John Brown's Notes and Essays

What a difference a hyphen makes ...

2012-02-02T03:28:00.000-08:00

An English-reader is not necessarily an English reader.

See also Tina Blue, "A Hyphen is not a Dash."

Wondering about Propaganda, Rhetoric, and Public Diplomacy

2012-01-30T20:15:00.000-08:00

A must-read read book about propaganda and rhetoric is Evonne's Levy's admirable Rhetoric and the Jesuit Baroque.

It poses a provocative question: What is the difference between rhetoric -- classical, Aristotelian rhetoric -- and 20th-century propaganda?

Reflecting on her comments, and fully aware of my immense intellectual limitations (I don't read Greek and am no philosopher) on this subject, I now venture to suggest the following:

Tone: Aristotelian rhetoric is even-tempered. Twentieth-century propaganda is marked by stridency, irrationality and violence to language.

Audience: Aristotelian rhetoric, while not overlooking the importance of human feelings (1), is an appeal to those who think and can control their dog-eat-dog instincts. Twentieth-century propaganda aims to manipulate the crowd by firing-up atavistic emotions.

Purpose: Propaganda, let's face it, exists for one purpose and one purpose only: for the benefit of the propagandist and/or her organization (nothing wrong with that, by the way; but it's how you do it). Aristotelian rhetoric does, however, "reach out" beyond the propagandist for the benefit of the polis (here I am speculating; perhaps I am being overly kind to politicians, even of the best sort). And, course, there is the question of religious, specifically Catholic, propaganda during the Counter-Reformation: to whose "benefit" was it carried out? The Church as an organization? Or maybe, in the eyes of devoted priests, for the benefit of God? Or even more altruistically, for the benefit of the heathen themselves?).

Tools: The spoken word in all its purity and complexity is the essence of Aristotelian rhetoric. The brutal amplication of sound and images for purposes of simplification and therefore manipulation marks 20th-century propaganda.

Walter Isaacson, who's decided to leave his position as Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, characterized the Declaration of Independence as "in effect, a work of propaganda -- or, to put it more politely, an exercise in public diplomacy".

I am not quite sure whether our (American,e but maybe universal?) Declaration -- an 18th century document, reflecting the past but forecasting the future -- reflects classical rhetoric or 20th century propaganda. Perhaps, the the Declaration is indeed propaganda, in the sense that in its putative appeal to the values of mankind, it sought to change the behavior of a refined but parochial Euro-America world (or, more specifically put, the enlighted "Republic of Letters" of that community) for the benefit of the rebellious colonies -- i.e., to get support for American independence for the elite in that narrow but geographical extensive world (reminds me of the Internet).

Give credit to Isaacson:The Declaration, like all propaganda, benign or crude, was a me-first statement: it aimed to win over a "candid" world in favor of American independence by listing "facts" so that a white-skinned, male elite of property-owners in the American colonies could be "independent" -- arguably and more crudely put, didn't want others like themselves in the British Empire controlling/taxing them.

Be that as it may, the Declaration, for all its impolite (but, arguably, justified) polemic against George III and attacks on Native Americans, is far more civilized in its politics than the crudity of much of 20th-century propaganda, and not only that of totalitarian states.

As for propaganda in our new century, it is an illusion to believe that the "social media" mean an end to a phenomenon that has existed since the begining of mankind, propaganda. The purpose of propaganda is, essentially, "Do as I say." And that aspiration (illusion) on the part of (usually) elites, so many of them self-proclaimed, has existed since Adam and Eve, in various forms: some crude, some sophiscated.

Just ask Jared Cohen or Alec Ross.

I can see Twitter as the perfect tool for 21st-century dictators.

(1) From Aristotle's Rhetoric, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Aristotle joins Plato in criticizing contemporary manuals of rhetoric. But how does he manage to distinguish his own project from the criticized manuals? The general idea seems to be this: Previous theorists of rhetoric gave most of their attention to methods outside the subject; they taught how to slander, how to arouse emotions in the audience, or how to distract the attention of the hearers from the subject. This style of rhetoric promotes a situation in which juries and assemblies no longer form rational judgments about the given issues, but surrender to the litigants. Aristotelian rhetoric is different in this respect: it is centered on the rhetorical kind of proof, the enthymeme (see below §6), which is called the most important means of persuasion. Since people are most strongly convinced when they suppose that something has been proven (Rhet. I.1, 1355a5f.), there is no need for the orator to confuse or distract the audience by the use of emotional appeals, etc."

Will "dangerous neighborhoods" in US cities be next?

2012-01-30T06:24:00.000-08:00

U.S. Drones Patrolling Its Skies Provoke Outrage in Iraq

By ERIC SCHMITT and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, New York Times

BAGHDAD — A month after the last American troops left Iraq, the State Department is operating a small fleet of surveillance drones here to help protect the United States Embassy and consulates, as well as American personnel. Some senior Iraqi officials expressed outrage at the program, saying the unarmed aircraft are an affront to Iraqi sovereignty.

The program was described by the department’s diplomatic security branch in a little-noticed section of its most recent annual report and outlined in broad terms in a two-page online prospectus for companies that might bid on a contract to manage the program. It foreshadows a possible expansion of unmanned drone operations into the diplomatic arm of the American government; until now they have been mainly the province of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

American contractors say they have been told that the State Department is considering to field unarmed surveillance drones in the future in a handful of other potentially “high-threat” countries, including Indonesia and Pakistan, and in Afghanistan after the bulk of American troops leave in the next two years. State Department officials say that no decisions have been made beyond the drone operations in Iraq.

The drones are the latest example of the State Department’s efforts to take over functions in Iraq that the military used to perform. Some 5,000 private security contractors now protect the embassy’s 11,000-person staff, for example, and typically drive around in heavily armored military vehicles.

When embassy personnel move throughout the country, small helicopters buzz over the convoys to provide support in case of an attack. Often, two contractors armed with machine guns are tethered to the outside of the helicopters. The State Department began operating some drones in Iraq last year on a trial basis, and stepped up their use after the last American troops left Iraq in December, taking the military drones with them.

The United States, which will soon begin taking bids to manage drone operations in Iraq over the next five years, needs formal approval from the Iraqi government to use such aircraft here, Iraqi officials said. Such approval may be untenable given the political tensions between the two countries. Now that the troops are gone, Iraqi politicians often denounce the United States in an effort to rally support from their followers.

A senior American official said that negotiations were under way to obtain authorization for the current drone operations, but Ali al-Mosawi, a top adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki; Iraq’s national security adviser, Falih al-Fayadh; and the acting minister of interior, Adnan al-Asadi, all said in interviews that they had not been consulted by the Americans.

Mr. Asadi said that he opposed the drone program: “Our sky is our sky, not the U.S.A.’s sky.”

The Pentagon and C.I.A. have been stepping up their use of armed Predator and Reaper drones to conduct strikes against militants in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. More recently, the United States has expanded drone bases in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and a secret location in the Arabian Peninsula.

The State Department drones, by contrast, carry no weapons and are meant to provide data and images of possible hazards, like public protests or roadblocks, to security personnel on the ground, American officials said. They are much smaller than armed drones, with wingspans as short as 18 inches, compared with 55 feet for the Predators.

The State Department has about two dozen drones in Iraq, but many are used only for spare parts, the officials said.

The United States Embassy in Baghdad referred all questions about the drones to the State Department in Washington.

The State Department confirmed the existence of the program, calling the devices unmanned aerial vehicles, but it declined to provide details. “The department does have a U.A.V. program,” it said in a statement without referring specifically to Iraq. “The U.A.V.’s being utilized by the State Department are not armed, nor are they capable of being armed.”

When the American military was still in Iraq, white blimps equipped with sensors hovered over many cities, providing the Americans with surveillance abilities beyond the dozens of armed and unarmed drones used by the military. But the blimps came down at the end of last year as the military completed its withdrawal. Anticipating this, the State Department began developing its own drone operations.

According to the most recent annual report of the department’s diplomatic security branch, issued last June, the branch worked with the Pentagon and other agencies in 2010 to research the use of low-altitude, long-endurance unmanned drones “in high-threat locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The document said that the program was tested in Iraq in December 2010. “The program will watch over State Department facilities and personnel and assist regional security officers with high-threat mission planning and execution,” the document said.

In the online prospectus, called a “presolicitation notice,” the State Department last September outlined a broad requirement to provide “worldwide Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (U.A.V.) support services.” American officials said this was to formalize the initial program.

The program’s goal is “to provide real-time surveillance of fixed installations, proposed movement routes and movement operations,” referring to American convoy movements. In addition, the program’s mission is “improving security in high-threat or potentially high-threat environments.”

The document does not identify specific countries, but contracting specialists familiar with the program say that it focuses initially on operations in Iraq. That is “where the need is greatest,” said one contracting official who spoke on condition of anonymity, because the contract is still in its early phase.

In the next few weeks, the department is expected to issue a more detailed proposal, requesting bids from private contractors to operate the drones. That document, the department said Friday, will describe the scope of the program, including the overall cost and other specifics.

While the preliminary proposal has drawn interest from more than a dozen companies, some independent specialists who are familiar with drone operations expressed skepticism about the State Department’s ability to manage such a complicated and potentially risky enterprise.

“The State Department needs to get through its head that it is not an agency adept at running military-style operations,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,” a book about military robotics.

The American plans to use drones in the air over Iraq have also created yet another tricky issue for the two countries, as Iraq continues to assert its sovereignty after the nearly nine-year occupation. Many Iraqis remain deeply skeptical of the United States, feelings that were reinforced last week when the Marine who was the so-called ringleader of the 2005 massacre of 24 Iraqis in the village of Haditha avoided prison time and was sentenced to a reduction in rank.

“If they are afraid about their diplomats being attacked in Iraq, then they can take them out of the country,” said Mohammed Ghaleb Nasser, 57, an engineer from the northern city of Mosul.

Hisham Mohammed Salah, 37, an Internet cafe owner in Mosul, said he did not differentiate between surveillance drones and the ones that fire missiles. “We hear from time to time that drone aircraft have killed half a village in Pakistan and Afghanistan under the pretext of pursuing terrorists,” Mr. Salah said. “Our fear is that will happen in Iraq under a different pretext.”

Still, Ghanem Owaid Nizar Qaisi, 45, a teacher from Diyala, said that he doubted that the Iraqi government would stop the United States from using the drones. “I believe that Iraqi politicians will accept it, because they are weak,” he said.

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Michael S. Schmidt from Baghdad.

The point of the long and winding sentence

2012-01-29T04:45:00.000-08:00

The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence: Pico Iyer says writing longer phrases is a way to protest the speed of information bites people are subjected to each day - By Pico Iyer, Los Angeles Times

January 8, 2012

"Your sentences are so long," said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn't quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn't want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn't have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may not have sensed was this: I'm using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment.

When I began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn't get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV. Facts were what we needed most. And if you watched the world closely enough, I believed (and still do), you could begin to see what it would do next, just as you can with a sibling or a friend; Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie aren't mystics, but they can tell us what the world is going to do tomorrow because they follow it so attentively.

Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the "gaps," as Annie Dillard calls them — that don't show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying "Open wider" so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it's not the mouth that he's attending to but the mind).

"There was a little stoop of humility," Alan Hollinghurst writes in a sentence I've chosen almost at random from his recent novel "The Stranger's Child," "as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted." You may notice — though you don't have to — that "humility" has rather quickly elided into "affectation," and the point of view has shifted by the end of the sentence, and the physical movement through the rooms accompanies a gradual inner movement that progresses through four parallel clauses, each of which, though legato, suggests a slightly different take on things.

Many a reader will have no time for this; William Gass or Sir Thomas Browne may seem long-winded, the equivalent of driving from L.A. to San Francisco by way of Death Valley, Tijuana and the Sierras. And a highly skilled writer, a Hemingway or James Salter, can get plenty of shading and suggestion into even the shortest and straightest of sentences. But too often nowadays our writing is telegraphic as a way of keeping our thinking simplistic, our feeling slogan-crude. The short sentence is the domain of uninflected talk-radio rants and shouting heads on TV who feel that qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity (and not, as it truly is, integrity's greatest adornment).

If we continue along this road, whole areas of feeling and cognition and experience will be lost to us. We will not be able to read one another very well if we can't read Proust's labyrinthine sentences, admitting us to those half-lighted realms where memory blurs into imagination, and we hide from the person we care for or punish the thing that we love. And how can we feel the layers, the sprawl, the many-sidedness of Istanbul in all its crowding amplitude without the 700-word sentence, transcribing its features, that Orhan Pamuk offered in tribute to his lifelong love?

To pick up a book is, ideally, to enter a world of intimacy and continuity; the best volumes usher us into a larger universe, a more spacious state of mind akin to the one I feel when hearing Bach (or Sigur Rós) or watching a Terrence Malick film. I cherish Thomas Pynchon's prose (in "Mason & Dixon," say), not just because it's beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and the predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn't dared to contemplate. I can't get enough of Philip Roth because the energy and the complication of his sentences, at his best, pull me into a furious debate in which I see a mind alive, self-questioning, wildly controlled in its engagement with the world. His is a prose that banishes all simplicities while never letting go of passion.

Not every fashioner of many-comma'd sentences works for every one of us — I happen to find Henry James unreadable, his fussily unfolding clauses less a reflection of his noticing everything than of his inability to make up his mind or bring anything to closure: a kind of mental stutter. But the promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can't get your mind, or most of your words, around.

When I read the great exemplar of this, Herman Melville — and when I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" swells with clause after biblical clause of all the things people of his skin color cannot do — I feel as if I'm stepping out of the crowded, overlighted fluorescent culture of my local convenience store and being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space, in myself and in the world. It's as if I've been rescued, for a moment, from the jostle and rush of the 405 Freeway and led back to something inside me that has room for certainty and doubt at once.

Watch Dillard light up and rise up and ease down as she finds, near the end of her 1974 book "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," "a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair. Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world's rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down."

I love books; I read and write them for the same reason I love to talk with a friend for 10 hours, not 10 minutes (let alone, as is the case with the average Web page, 10 seconds). The longer our talk goes, ideally, the less I feel pushed and bullied into the unbreathing boxes of black and white, Republican or Democrat, us or them. The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas or nays.

There'll always be a place for the short sentence, and no one could thrill more than I to the eerie incantations of DeLillo, building up menace with each reiterated note, or the compressed wisdom of a Wilde; it's the elegant conciseness of their phrases that allow us to carry around the ideas of an Emerson (or Lao Tzu) as if they were commandments or proverbs of universal application.

But we've got shortness and speed up the wazoo these days; what I long for is something that will sustain me and stretch me till something snaps, take me so far beyond a simple clause or a single formulation that suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself in a place that feels as spacious and strange as life itself.

The long sentence opens the very doors that a short sentence simply slams shut. Though the sentence I sent my copy editor was as short as possible. No.

Iyer is the author, most recently, of "The Man Within My Head," published this month.

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Philosophy — What’s the Use?

2012-01-26T07:21:00.000-08:00

Philosophy — What’s the Use?
By GARY GUTTING, New York Times

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

Tags:
Ethics, Philosophy

Almost every article that appears in The Stone provokes some comments from readers challenging the very idea that philosophy has anything relevant to say to non-philosophers. There are, in particular, complaints that philosophy is an irrelevant “ivory-tower” exercise, useless to any except those interested in logic-chopping for its own sake.

There is an important conception of philosophy that falls to this criticism. Associated especially with earlier modern philosophers, particularly René Descartes, this conception sees philosophy as the essential foundation of the beliefs that guide our everyday life. For example, I act as though there is a material world and other people who experience it as I do. But how do I know that any of this is true? Couldn’t I just be dreaming of a world outside my thoughts? And, since (at best) I see only other human bodies, what reason do I have to think that there are any minds connected to those bodies? To answer these questions, it would seem that I need rigorous philosophical arguments for my existence and the existence of other thinking humans.

Of course, I don’t actually need any such arguments, if only because I have no practical alternative to believing that I and other people exist. As soon as we stop thinking weird philosophical thoughts, we immediately go back to believing what skeptical arguments seem to call into question. And rightly so, since, as David Hume pointed out, we are human beings before we are philosophers.

But what Hume and, by our day, virtually all philosophers are rejecting is only what I’m calling the foundationalist conception of philosophy. Rejecting foundationalism means accepting that we have every right to hold basic beliefs that are not legitimated by philosophical reflection. More recently, philosophers as different as Richard Rorty and Alvin Plantinga have cogently argued that such basic beliefs include not only the “Humean” beliefs that no one can do without, but also substantive beliefs on controversial questions of ethics, politics and religion. Rorty, for example, maintained that the basic principles of liberal democracy require no philosophical grounding (“the priority of democracy over philosophy”).

If you think that the only possible “use” of philosophy would be to provide a foundation for beliefs that need no foundation, then the conclusion that philosophy is of little importance for everyday life follows immediately. But there are other ways that philosophy can be of practical significance.

Even though basic beliefs on ethics, politics and religion do not require prior philosophical justification, they do need what we might call “intellectual maintenance,” which itself typically involves philosophical thinking. Religious believers, for example, are frequently troubled by the existence of horrendous evils in a world they hold was created by an all-good God. Some of their trouble may be emotional, requiring pastoral guidance. But religious commitment need not exclude a commitment to coherent thought. For instance, often enough believers want to know if their belief in God makes sense given the reality of evil. The philosophy of religion is full of discussions relevant to this question. Similarly, you may be an atheist because you think all arguments for God’s existence are obviously fallacious. But if you encounter, say, a sophisticated version of the cosmological argument, or the design argument from fine-tuning, you may well need a clever philosopher to see if there’s anything wrong with it.

In addition to defending our basic beliefs against objections, we frequently need to clarify what our basic beliefs mean or logically entail. So, if I say I would never kill an innocent person, does that mean that I wouldn’t order the bombing of an enemy position if it might kill some civilians? Does a commitment to democratic elections require one to accept a fair election that puts an anti-democratic party into power? Answering such questions requires careful conceptual distinctions, for example, between direct and indirect results of actions, or between a morality of intrinsically wrong actions and a morality of consequences. Such distinctions are major philosophical topics, of course, and most non-philosophers won’t be in a position to enter into high-level philosophical discussions. But there are both non-philosophers who are quite capable of following such discussions and philosophers who enter public debates about relevant topics.

The perennial objection to any appeal to philosophy is that philosophers themselves disagree among themselves about everything, so that there is no body of philosophical knowledge on which non-philosophers can rely. It’s true that philosophers do not agree on answers to the “big questions” like God’s existence, free will, the nature of moral obligation and so on. But they do agree about many logical interconnections and conceptual distinctions that are essential for thinking clearly about the big questions. Some examples: thinking about God and evil requires the key distinction between evil that is gratuitous (not necessary for some greater good) and evil that is not gratuitous; thinking about free will requires the distinction between a choice’s being caused and its being compelled; and thinking about morality requires the distinction between an action that is intrinsically wrong (regardless of its consequences) and one that is wrong simply because of its consequences. Such distinctions arise from philosophical thinking, and philosophers know a great deal about how to understand and employ them. In this important sense, there is body of philosophical knowledge on which non-philosophers can and should rely.

Evgeny Morozov: Public Diplomacy 2.1

2012-01-24T06:18:00.000-08:00

Public Diplomacy 2.1: TEDGlobal Fellow Evgeny Morozov argues that the US should upgrade its social media outreach.

JB Note: How refreshing to read a article on the new social media that makes a strong case that the U.S., in its public-diplomacy efforts, should use the Internet
to share its cultural and intellectual riches with the rest of the world in an in-depth fashion.

By Evgeny Morozov

In June, the inventive use of sites such as Twitter and Facebook by ordinary Iranians, primarily to report on, but also to organize protests in the streets of Tehran, once and for all proved that new media have vast geopolitical implications. But an Internet coup it wasn’t; the real “Twitter revolution” was happening not in Iran, but in Washington’s Foggy Bottom. After all, what better term to describe the newly elevated role that social media now plays in America’s public diplomacy?

In the months after the Iranian election, American diplomats began preaching the virtues of “public diplomacy 2.0,” a fancy catchall term to describe their ambitious efforts to profit from services such as Twitter. For example, the work of the Digital Outreach Team — a 10-person group inside the US State Department that finds controversial posts about the country on foreign blogs and discussion forums, and responds to them in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu — is a direct outgrowth of this approach.

To some, the triumph of “public diplomacy 2.0” appears inevitable, given that the old toolkit used for winning hearts and minds of global audiences — consisting mostly of US-funded TV and radio broadcasting — has been rapidly losing ground to the Internet. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of the US Congress, leaves no ambiguity about the urgency of the matter, positing that a failure to adapt to the Internet age may “significantly raise the risk that US public diplomacy efforts could become increasingly irrelevant, particularly among younger audiences.” Most importantly, many of America’s adversaries have eagerly embraced new media, too; the propaganda of the deed has given way to the propaganda of the tweet.

However, navigating today’s new media maze has proven rather challenging, especially for multi-layered and inflexible bureaucratic entities such as the State Department. The edgy, chaotic, and rebellious spirit of blogging and social networking appears to be a poor fit for the stiff, officious, and centralized style of communications favored by diplomats; after all, a say-nothing press release sounds as trite when posted on Twitter as it does in print.

In retrospect, given how little influence American “cyber-diplomats” had on events in Tehran via Twitter and Facebook, one wonders whether they overestimated the power of such sites. “Polluting” these online communities with US-approved messages adds very little to the global appeal of American diplomacy; this fledgling form of geopolitical spam is surely irritating, and some online goodwill is destroyed in the process. This “geo-spamming” may have doubled the supply of American ideas, but it has not increased global demand for them.

American diplomats should stop trying to explain the country’s often inexplicable foreign policy in 140 characters or less. Instead, they should use the Internet to sell the very idea of America, and there is no better way to do this than to open up the country’s vast cultural riches to the rest of the world — in cyberspace. Allowing the global public to view what America’s best universities, libraries, and museums have to offer from the comfort of their browsers must be at the heart of any “public diplomacy 2.0” efforts.

For example, videos of more than 200 full-length university-level courses are available for anyone to watch online for free, virtually all of them produced by a handful of American universities. This, however, is only a tiny fraction of what American universities offer in one term. Helping schools to put more of their courses online could be the most effective way to promote American ideas to the “digital natives” of India, China, Russia, or Iran, as well as to teach them practical skills essential to their emerging middle classes.

Similarly, American libraries and museums should be encouraged to open up their virtual doors to foreign audiences. Although not every Indonesian or Egyptian can visit New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art or Harvard’s library, they would surely appreciate more opportunities to explore their vast collections from their laptops and cell phones. A stronger nudge from the government, especially if it comes with financial incentives, could help boost the nascent digital outreach strategies that many of these institutions have already developed.

This could be done by having American diplomats forge effective partnerships with the private sector; companies such as Google and Amazon have already done a lot to make America’s best literary works available remotely. Unfortunately, much of this digital goodness is still unavailable to foreign audiences: Even the Kindle, Amazon’s revolutionary reading device, is currently available only in the US. Ideally, it should not only be available in Moscow or Delhi but also arrive there full of works by people who shaped American identity, from Franklin to Thoreau, and from Lincoln to Whitman, all brought to you by the US State Department. Now, that would be something even America’s loudest critics won’t ever dare call spam.

Journalist and author Evgeny Morozov is currently a Fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York. He spoke at TEDGlobal and is a TEDGlobal Fellow.

Kind Response on Facebook from US Ambassador to Russia McFaul re US Public Diplomacy in Russia

2012-01-23T15:16:00.000-08:00

JB Note: I do hope the new US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, given his many official duties, which doubtless will increase exponentially the longer he's in Russia, will, if he can, continue his social-media dialogue with those concerned, as he is now, about US-Russian relations.

He is much to be admired for responding to members of the public, including with the below -- the kind of open communications not all government officials, and not only in the United States, welcome -- or, more appropriately put, even bother to acknowledge.

Having worked in the USIA/State Department as a Foreign Service officer for over twenty years, however, and having witnessed how busy an Ambassador's schedule is, I wonder, for his sake, how Dr. McFaul will be able to respond personally, as he kindly did to the below, to all the electronic messages that he undubitably will be getting.

I wish him and his busy and devoted staff all the very best in this new age of the social-media information revolution in their efforts of keeping the lines of communications open to all -- not only with Russians but also now (with the internet-caused breakdown between domestic and foreign audiences) more than ever with Americans as well.

From a Facebook exchange:

"John Brown [to Ambassador McFaul:] This interview [Russian-language interview at http://ria.ru/interview/20120123/546647153.html:] Mr. Ambassador, is (in my modest opinion) far more on the mark from the perspective of US-Russian relations than your YouTube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpeWJ3zNgqE]
presentation, which seemed produced by a USA advertising firm without knowledge of Russia or its culture. And, thank God, [the above-cited] print version of your remarks did not allow for corny background music as was the case with the video! Best wishes, John Brown, former CAO Moscow [98-01] (my Huffington Post piece on your YouTube presentation at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brown/us-ambassador-to-russian-_b_1208580.html: U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul's YouTube Presentation From a Public Diplomacy Perspective http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ [:] I've looked at/listened to newly-appointed U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McF...aul's recent video presentation to the people of Russia. Based on my Foreign Service experience in Moscow as Cultural Affairs Officer (1998-2001), several aspects of the talk struck me.See More..2 hours ago ·

LikeUnlike · .Michael McFaul Ill take a look.

2 hours ago · LikeUnlike.Michael McFaul Just read. Thanks for feedback. I did whole take in Russian, but producers obviously felt that my Russian not good enough YET. Working on it. On high culture, eager to learn more while here, but would have been dishonest for me to praise books and symphonies I havent read or heard. Remember, I grew up in Butte, MT. I am VERY proud of that fact, dont get me wrong. But I may not be as refined as I should be at this stage in my career. Never too late to learn!"

Libya, Rice, and Jareb Cohen

2012-01-23T13:30:00.000-08:00

I continue to be struck by the vulgarity of the below photograph, posted on facebook by social media guru and "terrorism" expert Jared Cohen, a former State Department official, with his following comment: "Standing on top of Muammar Gadaffi's former house in Libya."

Mr. Cohen, displaying himself in this triumphant gladiator pose (at least he's not urinating) seems to have forgotten that he was one of the "best and brightest" in the Bush II's State Department, during which the US established diplomatic relations (2006) with an odious regime.

Cohen's Foggy Bottom gig at/around that time? Member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff (2006-2009).

I wonder if, because of possible public-diplomacy "social media" advice Cohen gave Rice (of course, not about Graig's List), Gadaffi so admired his "darling black woman."

Here I fantasize: Could the the doctor and the colonel have met, prior to their encounter in the grubby real world, in the far more tititllating paradise of cyberspace?

But I better stop here, unless I aspire to be as vulgar and ridiculous as Mr. Cohen.

What You (Really) Need to Know (not Foreign Languages) -- Summers

2012-01-22T07:01:00.000-08:00

January 20, 2012

What You (Really) Need to Know

JB note: Evidently Mr. Summers feels that studying foreign languages is a waste of time. Well, ok, we all know that "English, if it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me." But certainly, in at least one field, public diplomacy, knowledge of the language(s) of the country in which a diplomat is serving is quite essential.

By LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS, New York Times

A PARADOX of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a template for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society’s cutting edge.

And the world is changing very rapidly. Think social networking, gay marriage, stem cells or the rise of China. Most companies look nothing like they did 50 years ago. Think General Motors, AT&T or Goldman Sachs.

Yet undergraduate education changes remarkably little over time. My immediate predecessor as Harvard president, Derek Bok, famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery. With few exceptions, just as in the middle of the 20th century, students take four courses a term, each meeting for about three hours a week, usually with a teacher standing in front of the room. Students are evaluated on the basis of examination essays handwritten in blue books and relatively short research papers. Instructors are organized into departments, most of which bear the same names they did when the grandparents of today’s students were undergraduates. A vast majority of students still major in one or two disciplines centered on a particular department.

It may be that inertia is appropriate. Part of universities’ function is to keep alive man’s greatest creations, passing them from generation to generation. Certainly anyone urging reform does well to remember that in higher education the United States remains an example to the world, and that American universities compete for foreign students more successfully than almost any other American industry competes for foreign customers.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to speculate: Suppose the educational system is drastically altered to reflect the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. How will what universities teach be different? Here are some guesses and hopes.

1. Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it. This is a consequence of both the proliferation of knowledge — and how much of it any student can truly absorb — and changes in technology. Before the printing press, scholars had to memorize “The Canterbury Tales” to have continuing access to them. This seems a bit ludicrous to us today. But in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important.

2. An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration. As just one example, the fraction of economics papers that are co-authored has more than doubled in the 30 years that I have been an economist. More significant, collaboration is a much greater part of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system. Indeed, excessive collaboration with others goes by the name of cheating.

For most people, school is the last time they will be evaluated on individual effort. One leading investment bank has a hiring process in which a candidate must interview with upward of 60 senior members of the firm before receiving an offer. What is the most important attribute they’re looking for? Not GMAT scores or college transcripts, but the ability to work with others. As greater value is placed on collaboration, surely it should be practiced more in our nation’s classrooms.

3. New technologies will profoundly alter the way knowledge is conveyed. Electronic readers allow textbooks to be constantly revised, and to incorporate audio and visual effects. Think of a music text in which you can hear pieces of music as you read, or a history text in which you can see film clips about what you are reading. But there are more profound changes set in train. There was a time when professors had to prepare materials for their students. Then it became clear that it would be a better system if textbooks were written by just a few of the most able: faculty members would be freed up and materials would be improved, as competition drove up textbook quality.

Similarly, it makes sense for students to watch video of the clearest calculus teacher or the most lucid analyst of the Revolutionary War rather than having thousands of separate efforts. Professors will have more time for direct discussion with students — not to mention the cost savings — and material will be better presented. In a 2008 survey of first- and second-year medical students at Harvard, those who used accelerated video lectures reported being more focused and learning more material faster than when they attended lectures in person.

4. As articulated by the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” we understand the processes of human thought much better than we once did. We are not rational calculating machines but collections of modules, each programmed to be adroit at a particular set of tasks. Not everyone learns most effectively in the same way. And yet in the face of all evidence, we rely almost entirely on passive learning. Students listen to lectures or they read and then are evaluated on the basis of their ability to demonstrate content mastery. They aren’t asked to actively use the knowledge they are acquiring.

“Active learning classrooms” — which cluster students at tables, with furniture that can be rearranged and integrated technology — help professors interact with their students through the use of media and collaborative experiences. Still, with the capacity of modern information technology, there is much more that can be done to promote dynamic learning.

5. [JB highlight] The world is much more open, and events abroad affect the lives of Americans more than ever before. This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanism — that students have international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world. It seems logical, too, that more in the way of language study be expected of students. I am not so sure.

English’s emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.

6. Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data. Gen. George Marshall famously told a Princeton commencement audience that it was impossible to think seriously about the future of postwar Europe without giving close attention to Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War. Of course, we’ll always learn from history. But the capacity for analysis beyond simple reflection has greatly increased (consider Gen. David Petraeus’s reliance on social science in preparing the army’s counterinsurgency manual).

As the “Moneyball” story aptly displays in the world of baseball, the marshalling of data to test presumptions and locate paths to success is transforming almost every aspect of human life. It is not possible to make judgments about one’s own medical care without some understanding of probability, and certainly the financial crisis speaks to the consequences of the failure to appreciate “black swan events” and their significance. In an earlier era, when many people were involved in surveying land, it made sense to require that almost every student entering a top college know something of trigonometry. Today, a basic grounding in probability statistics and decision analysis makes far more sense.

A good rule of thumb for many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could. Think, for example, of the widespread use of the e-book, or the coming home to roost of debt problems around the industrialized world. Here is a bet and a hope that the next quarter century will see more change in higher education than the last three combined.

Lawrence H. Summers is former president of Harvard University and former secretary of the Treasury. This essay is based on a speech Dr. Summers gave at The New York Times’s Schools for Tomorrow conference.

A Facebook Exchange, Pertaining to Public Diplomacy, with the Washington Post's Chief Executive Officer Don Graham

2012-01-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

Facebook exchange:

"John Brown [to Don Graham, chief executive officer and Chairman of The Washington Post Company; director and chairman of Facebook Inc.]: 'Too many adjectives in describing your declining newspaper's articles, e.g., 'excellent' and the horrid 'terrific.' You need better editors, not more self-promoting facebook entries. Thursday at 7:28am"

"Don Graham [chief executive officer and Chairman of The Washington Post Company; director and chairman of Facebook Inc.]mentioned you in a comment. Don wrote: 'John Brown, stop by and talk about it one morning. You can bring a supply of new adjectives.'"

"John Brown: Hi Don, How about meeting at the Subway eatery right off the west side of the Cleveland Park Metro Station on the Red Line? We could have lunch over a tuna/cheese 6" delight. It's a 'terrific' (or should I say 'excellent') place, so I'll be glad to be your 'friendly' host any day/time that's convenient to you. And of course we could, if you agree, read at à haute voix the 'fab' pieces from your intellectually declining 'high-quality' Washington Post, which matches the 'great' culinary qualities of Subway extremely well. Regrettably, I don't have a 'with-it' supply of new adjectives; so, if you don't mind, I'll bring loads of antiquated descriptive words (the older the better, I assure you, like what 'a-piece-of-crap' articles) -- and Alka Selzter (the item, not just the word) as well. Looking forward to our meeting," John

'35 minutes ago [from facebook] · LikeUnlike. Bill Kiehl I think someone should referee this grudge match!"

Blogs vs. Term Papers

2012-01-21T08:49:00.000-08:00

January 20, 2012
Blogs vs. Term Papers

By MATT RICHTEL, NYTimes (Via WC)

OF all the challenges faced by college and high school students, few inspire as much angst, profanity, procrastination and caffeine consumption as the academic paper. The format — meant to force students to make a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) — feels to many like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a minor key.

And so there may be rejoicing among legions of students who have struggled to write a lucid argument about Sherman’s March, the disputed authorship of “Romeo and Juliet,” or anything antediluvian. They have a champion: Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at Duke, wants to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog.

Her provocative positions have lent kindling to an intensifying debate about how best to teach writing in the digital era.

“This mechanistic writing is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers,” says Professor Davidson, who rails against the form in her new book, “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.”

“As a writer, it offends me deeply.”

Professor Davidson makes heavy use of the blog and the ethos it represents of public, interactive discourse. Instead of writing a quarterly term paper, students now regularly publish 500- to 1,500-word entries on an internal class blog about the issues and readings they are studying in class, along with essays for public consumption.

She’s in good company. Across the country, blog writing has become a basic requirement in everything from M.B.A. to literature courses. On its face, who could disagree with the transformation? Why not replace a staid writing exercise with a medium that gives the writer the immediacy of an audience, a feeling of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical connection to contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?

Because, say defenders of rigorous writing, the brief, sometimes personally expressive blog post fails sorely to teach key aspects of thinking and writing. They argue that the old format was less about how Sherman got to the sea and more about how the writer organized the points, fashioned an argument, showed grasp of substance and proof of its origin. Its rigidity wasn’t punishment but pedagogy.

Their reductio ad absurdum: why not just bypass the blog, too, and move right on to 140 characters about Shermn’s Mrch?

“Writing term papers is a dying art, but those who do write them have a dramatic leg up in terms of critical thinking, argumentation and the sort of expression required not only in college, but in the job market,” says Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist for the American School Board Journal and founder of the Leadership and Learning Center, the school-consulting division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”

The National Survey of Student Engagement found that in 2011, 82 percent of first-year college students and more than half of seniors weren’t asked to do a single paper of 20 pages or more, while the bulk of writing assignments were for papers of one to five pages.

The term paper has been falling from favor for some time. A study in 2002 estimated that about 80 percent of high school students were not asked to write a history term paper of more than 15 pages. William H. Fitzhugh, the study’s author and founder of The Concord Review, a journal that publishes high school students’ research papers, says that, more broadly, educators shy away from rigorous academic writing, giving students the relative ease of writing short essays. He argues that part of the problem is that teachers are asking students to read less, which means less substance — whether historical, political or literary — to focus a term paper around.

“She’s right,” Mr. Fitzhugh says of Professor Davidson. “Writing is being murdered. But the solution isn’t blogs, the solution is more reading. We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.”

He proposes what he calls the “page a year” solution: in first grade, a one-page paper using one source; by fifth grade, five pages and five sources.

The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: “old literacy” refers to more traditional forms of discourse and training; “new literacy” stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and audio essay.

“We’re at a crux right now of where we have to figure out as teachers what part of the old literacy is worth preserving,” says Andrea A. Lunsford, a professor of English at Stanford. “We’re trying to figure out how to preserve sustained, logical, carefully articulated arguments while engaging with the most exciting and promising new literacies.”

Professor Lunsford has collected 16,000 writing samples from 189 Stanford students from 2001 to 2007, and is studying how their writing abilities and passions evolved as blogs and other multimedia tools crept into their lives and classrooms. She’s also solicited student feedback about their experiences.

Her conclusion is that students feel much more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it. They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade.

So Professor Lunsford is playing to student passions. Her writing class for second-year students, a requirement at Stanford, used to revolve around a paper constructed over the entire term. Now, the students start by writing a 15-page paper on a particular subject in the first few weeks. Once that’s done, they use the ideas in it to build blogs, Web sites, and PowerPoint and audio and oral presentations. The students often find their ideas much more crystallized after expressing them with new media, she says, and then, most startling, they plead to revise their essays.

“What I’m asking myself is, ‘Will we need to keep the 15-page paper forever or move right to the new way?’ ” she says. “Stanford’s writing program won’t be making that change right away, since our students still seem to benefit from learning how to present their research findings in both traditional print and new media.”

As Professor Lunsford illustrates, choosing to educate using either blogs or term papers is something of a false opposition. Teachers can use both. And blogs, a platform that seems to encourage rambling exercises in personal expression, can also be well crafted and meticulously researched. At the same time, the debate is not a false one: while some educators fear that informal communication styles are increasing duress on traditional training, others find the actual paper fundamentally anachronistic.

Take Professor Davidson, who anchors a more extreme position, as she has for many years, even before the advent of the blog. When teaching at Michigan State in the 1980s, she says, she infuriated some colleagues because she scrapped the traditional research paper — what she calls “researchese,” writing not relevant outside academe — and had her students learn to write cover letters and business letters, their life stories and essays about their chosen careers.

“I was basically kicked out of the writing program for thinking that was more important than writing a five-paragraph essay,” she says. “I’m not against discipline. I’m not sure that writing a five-paragraph essay is discipline so much as standardization. It’s a formula, but good writing plays with formulas, and changes formulas.”

Today, she tries to keep herself grounded in the experiences of a range of students by tutoring at a community college. Recently, one student she tutors was given an assignment with prescribed sentence length and rigid structure. “I urged him to follow all the rules,” she says. “If he’d done it my way, I don’t know he’d have passed the class.

“The sad thing is, he’s now convinced there is brilliance in the art world, brilliance in the multimedia world, brilliance in the music world and that writing is boring,” Professor Davidson says. “I hated teaching him bad writing.”

Matt Richtel, a reporter at The Times, writes often about information technology in the classroom.

Amglish

2012-01-20T12:29:00.000-08:00

“Amglish In, Like Ten Easy Lessons: A Celebration of the New World Lingo” by Arthur E. Rowse

By Justin Moyer, Published: January 13, Washington Post

LANGUAGE

AMGLISH IN, LIKE, TEN EASY LESSONS

A Celebration of the New World Lingo

By Arthur E. Rowse

Rowman and Littlefield. 239 pp. Paperback, $16.95

It may be unforgivable to mistake “lay” for “lie,” confuse “that” with “which,” or use the serial comma. Or to deploy too many semicolons; usually, periods can take their place. Or to wanna use informal contractions and write run-on sentences and — OMG! — publish new-fangled abbreviations in a newspaper.

Perpetrators of these common grammatical slip-ups should pray that they don’t run into Arthur E. Rowse wielding a red-tipped felt pen. In what must be the most passive-aggressive grammar manifesto ever written by a nonagenarian former Washington Post copy editor, he takes imprecise writing and speaking to task by sarcastically embracing them.

“Life is too short to worry about making errors in language,” Rowse writes sarcastically in his withering book about “Amglish,” the still-evolving “informal mixture of American English and other languages.” “Unlike the rules of formal English, the rules of Amglish are unwritten and as fluid as society itself. . . . The resulting mishmash is being embraced enthusiastically almost everywhere.”

If Rowse sounds like a fussbudget, it’s because he is. The author disapproves of profane hip-hop and “its rapid-fire lyrics set to the sound of heavy drums”; “freaked-out valley girls” whose “greatest single contribution to today’s lingo . . . is the word ‘like’ ”; Jon Stewart (“By uttering the f-word so often while knowing it will be bleeped, he spares the millions outside the studio audience from hearing the word and, of course, laughing at his jokes”); and Apple’s ungrammatical “think different” campaign, which sought to “capitalize on the informal language trend.”

Though his discussion of novel English variants such as “Arablish, Chinglish, Konglish, Spanglish, and dozens of other international mixtures” is fascinating, Rowse’s gripes may resonate only with fellow graybeards whose sometimes justified complaints about declining linguistic standards frequently appear on the Free For All page of this newspaper. As Rowse explains, “Language errors have become an integral part of the current linguistic upheaval. . . . The whole exercise is either a delight or a continuing disaster.”

— Justin Moyer

Martin Luther King Statue: "Vaguely Socialist Realist Aesthetic"

2012-01-18T07:47:00.000-08:00

"I have mixed feelings about the vaguely Socialist Realist aesthetic of the new Martin Luther King memorial downtown [Washington, DC] – colossal statues of famous men are broadly associated in my mind with oppressed people tearing those statues down."

--Blogger Caro; see also John Brown, "Martin Luther King -- Hero of all-American Communism!," Notes and Essays

Who is Emboff?

2012-01-17T04:44:00.000-08:00

I don't quite remember when I encountered the term "Emboff" at an early point in my public-diplomacy Foreign Service career (1981-2003). While on one of my brief tours at USIA (United States Information Agency) Washington headquarters, I was assigned, among other tasks, to read for several weeks cables (telegrams) from the US mission in Paris. In these missives, I kept seeing references to Emboff: what he did, what he thought, what he recommended. Having studied Russian history (my dissertation was on an obscure 18th century Russian nobleman, Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov, arguably his country's first pomologist*), I wondered about the Russian connection of Mr. Emboff, as his name sounded Russian.

Bolotov image from

After some reflection, I came to the conclusion that Emboff's family must have been White Russians who emigrated to France after the Bolshevik Revolution. My reason for believing this was that his Russian-sounding name ended in "ff," the way Russian émigrés traditionally transliterated the Russian letter "в" (sound like "v" in "voice") into French. The common US transliteration, however, is "v" (Embov).

The more I read about Mr. Emboff, the more I was impressed by his multifarious activities. He seemed to be everywhere: at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at meetings with French intellectuals, on a visit to the provinces. I also wondered when his family had moved to the United States.

After too many days, it finally dawned on me, when I realized that no ordinary human being could do as much as Emboff did, that Emboff was an abbreviation for "Embassy Officer," a generic term for US diplomats overseas ...

All of which led me to suspect that my slow-working brain cells were not quite up to the high standards of FSOs (or should I say FSOffs). But, largely thanks to compassionate supervisors, I somehow managed to pull through.

****

*He also tried to cure his serfs of hemorrhoids by the use of electricity, a experiment Benjamin Franklin never attempted.

10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free

2012-01-17T01:07:00.000-08:00

10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free By Jonathan Turley, Washington Post Published: January 13

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

Assassination of U.S. citizens

President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. Last year, he approved the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi and another citizen under this claimed inherent authority. Last month, administration officials affirmed that power, stating that the president can order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists. (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.)

Indefinite detention

Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. While the administration claims that this provision only codified existing law, experts widely contest this view, and the administration has opposed efforts to challenge such authority in federal courts. The government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion. (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while countries such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for “prolonged detention.”)

Arbitrary justice

The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. Bush claimed this authority in 2001, and Obama has continued the practice. (Egypt and China have been denounced for maintaining separate military justice systems for selected defendants, including civilians.)

Warrantless searches

The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations. Bush acquired this sweeping power under the Patriot Act in 2001, and in 2011, Obama extended the power, including searches of everything from business documents to library records. The government can use “national security letters” to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens — and order them not to reveal the disclosure to the affected party. (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan operate under laws that allow the government to engage in widespread discretionary surveillance.)

Secret evidence

The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security — a claim made in a variety of privacy lawsuits and largely accepted by federal judges without question. Even legal opinions, cited as the basis for the government’s actions under the Bush and Obama administrations, have been classified. This allows the government to claim secret legal arguments to support secret proceedings using secret evidence. In addition, some cases never make it to court at all. The federal courts routinely deny constitutional challenges to policies and programs under a narrow definition of standing to bring a case.

War crimes

The world clamored for prosecutions of those responsible for waterboarding terrorism suspects during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration said in 2009 that it would not allow CIA employees to be investigated or prosecuted for such actions. This gutted not just treaty obligations but the Nuremberg principles of international law. When courts in countries such as Spain moved to investigate Bush officials for war crimes, the Obama administration reportedly urged foreign officials not to allow such cases to proceed, despite the fact that the United States has long claimed the same authority with regard to alleged war criminals in other countries. (Various nations have resisted investigations of officials accused of war crimes and torture. Some, such as Serbia and Chile, eventually relented to comply with international law; countries that have denied independent investigations include Iran, Syria and China.)

Secret court

The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. In 2011, Obama renewed these powers, including allowing secret searches of individuals who are not part of an identifiable terrorist group. The administration has asserted the right to ignore congressional limits on such surveillance. (Pakistan places national security surveillance under the unchecked powers of the military or intelligence services.)

Immunity from judicial review

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. (Similarly, China has maintained sweeping immunity claims both inside and outside the country and routinely blocks lawsuits against private companies.)

Continual monitoring of citizens

The Obama administration has successfully defended its claim that it can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review. (Saudi Arabia has installed massive public surveillance systems, while Cuba is notorious for active monitoring of selected citizens.)

Extraordinary renditions

The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and noncitizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects. The Obama administration says it is not continuing the abuses of this practice under Bush, but it insists on the unfettered right to order such transfers — including the possible transfer of U.S. citizens.

These new laws have come with an infusion of money into an expanded security system on the state and federal levels, including more public surveillance cameras, tens of thousands of security personnel and a massive expansion of a terrorist-chasing bureaucracy.

Some politicians shrug and say these increased powers are merely a response to the times we live in. Thus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could declare in an interview last spring without objection that “free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” Of course, terrorism will never “surrender” and end this particular “war.”

Other politicians rationalize that, while such powers may exist, it really comes down to how they are used. This is a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), for instance, has insisted that Congress is not making any decision on indefinite detention: “That is a decision which we leave where it belongs — in the executive branch.”

And in a signing statement with the defense authorization bill, Obama said he does not intend to use the latest power to indefinitely imprison citizens. Yet, he still accepted the power as a sort of regretful autocrat.

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.

The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Benjamin Franklin was more direct. In 1787, a Mrs. Powel confronted Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” His response was a bit chilling: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.

The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention.

Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.

Public-Diplomacy Advice for State Department Social Media Guru Alec Ross

2012-01-16T13:18:00.000-08:00

From:

Ambassador McFaul's YouTube Presentation from a Public Diplomacy Perspective

2012-01-15T16:01:00.000-08:00

I've looked at/listened to newly-appointed US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul's video presentation to the people of Russia. Several aspects of the talk struck me.

First, the negative ones, from the perspective of US public diplomacy with the Russian Federation, and especially its younger generation:

1. Repeated references to the Soviet Union (including showing a map of that former geographical expression), which collapsed some twenty years ago;

2. The fact that the Ambassador did not speak in Russian (as his predecessor did fluently on YouTube clips), except for a few words at the end of his remarks*;

3. The use of the word "help" (translated as pomogat' in the subtitle) in US dealings with the Russian population. Of all things Russians dislike most about foreigners, it is condescension of any sort on their part;

4. No reference to high Russian culture, except for Tchaikovsky (to which the Ambassador refers in the same breath as he does to Russian hockey); no references, even indirect, to intellectuals who condemned the USSR.

5. Irritating, feel-good background music that could be straight out of a US TV commercial for a Penile Dysfunction pill (an abbreviation of which, I can't resist saying, is the same as for public diplomat).

Positive:

1. Mentioning a new visa agreement that will make it easier to Russians to visit the U.S.;

2. An effort to reach out to the Russian "provinces" by comparing them to the Ambassador's home state of Montana;

3. A "down-to-earth" approach that might appeal to the "muzhik" (regular guy) side in the character of many Russians;

4. Stress on people-to-people exchanges;

5. He did not go on for too long, as do so many Russian politicians.

The Ambassador was careful not to confront the Putin regime, except by stating that he would be in contact with "civil society activists," whom he not very tactfully distinguished from "regular Russians."

Russian speakers/readers of the language might be struck, as I was, by the number of negative comments to the Ambassador's presentation, which suggests that Russian anti-Americanism is indeed a factor to consider in the two countries' relations -- and that, on a more mundane level, Russians use the Internet as a way of "letting off steam." It is not out of the question that some of the comments were "planted" by Russian security services.

---

*However, it is better, in official remarks, for a foreigner to speak in his own language than address Russians in "bad" Russian, which will quickly "turn off" his audience. A few words indicating an appreciation of their language, yes; a long delivery full of grammatical and pronunciation errors, no. The Russians, though more tolerant of foreign accents than some other Europeans, are a bit like the French who cringe when they have to endure an American murdering their mother tongue by trying awkwardly to express himself in it, in his effort to show that he "understands" them. In contrast, we Americans, a nation of immigrants, tend not to be concerned with such linguistic niceties, even though there is a feeling in this country, not limited to Texas, that "English, if it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me."

Mc Faul image from

Public Diplomacy and the National Museum of the American Indian

2012-01-14T12:30:00.000-08:00

In the company of a distinguished American journalist, I visited the National Museum of the American Indian the other day. I had been there before, and been taken off guard by its emptiness -- its lack of well-identified objects on display. This time around, I was again shocked by how little this cavernous building in central Washington tells (can tell?) about

the history and culture of Native Americans. It is a coffin without a body.

My friend, a man of far more profound ideas than my own, shared my concern, and made a memorable remark, which I paraphrase here: "In an ironic way, in its voidness, this place tells us more about the extermination of a people than the Holocaust Museum nearby."

My widely-traveled pal added that the Indian Museum was among the sites most visited by foreigners who come to Washington. (Again, I paraphrase him: "Tourists don't come to DC to see European masters at the National Gallery of Art").

So, impressed by his comment, I wonder, former diplomat that I am, what public diplomacy impact this essentially vacant stone structure on the Mall, "sheltered by a roof that recalls a limestone overhang in a Southwest U.S. canyon" and dedicated to the ancestors of native Americans, has on persons from other countries in search of enlightenment about the U.S.

If disappointed by the museum's exhibits, tourists might at first be intrigued by its restaurant, which promises to have interesting and "unusual" food. But, judging by the "Buffalo Burger" that I consumed more out of hunger than delight, this souped-up, outragerously expensive cafeteria has much more to do with squeezing dollars out of visitors than titillating their palates.

Image of the National Museum of the American Indian from

The power of "soft power"

2012-01-13T04:50:00.000-08:00

Near-riot prompts Apple to halt iPhone 4S release in China: The device has sold out at the company's five China stores. When one store refused to open, a mob responded by throwing eggs. The company says the phones won't be available in China "for the time being" - Jonathan Kaiman and John Lee, Los Angeles Times

1:52 AM PST, January 13, 2012

Reporting from Beijing

Apple Inc. halted the release of its iPhone 4S at retail stores in Beijing and Shanghai on Friday after a riot almost started outside one of its stores in the Chinese capital.

An angry mob of people who had waited overnight pelted the store with eggs and assaulted a mall manager after employees refused to open as scheduled.

Carolyn Wu, an Apple spokeswoman in Beijing, said the company's five authorized stores in China had sold out of the iPhone 4S and the Beijing store was prevented from opening because of the large crowd.

"To ensure the safety of our customers and employees, [the] iPhone will not be available in our retail stores in Beijing and Shanghai for the time being," Wu said.

The phone is still available online through its service provider, China Unicom, which is offering the device for free provided users commit to multiyear contracts. But the crowds that lined up at Apple stores were not interested in cell phone plans, and were willing to pay $790 to $1070 for the device alone.

People started converging Thursday outside the Apple store in one of Beijing's most popular high-end malls. Some brought sleeping bags. Tension grew overnight and through the early morning as prospective buyers sought positions near the front door. Fights broke out between bands of migrant workers who had been hired by scalpers to purchase the phones for later sale on the gray market.

"Ninety percent of the people here are scalpers," said a man surnamed Jin, who said friends recruited him to stand in line.

The incident underscores the popularity of the Apple brand in China, which has one of the world's fastest growing markets for mobile phones and personal computers.

The Cupertino-based company said in October that sales in China rose to $13 billion from $3 billion for the fiscal year ended Sept. 24. Plans are afoot to make the iPhone's digital assistant, Siri, fluent in Chinese.

Apple's five official stores in China -- three in Shanghai and two in Beijing -- generate more revenue on average than any other Apple stores in the world, the company said last year.

Many upwardly mobile urbanites wouldn't be caught dead without an iPhone. In June, a 17-year-old high school student reportedly sold a kidney to buy an iPad 2. And in September, a 16-year-old girl was killed in a fight with her mother over the right to buy an Apple computer.

The scene Friday was not the first time an Apple release had caused a public disturbance. The same Beijing store had its glass door shattered in May after a scuffle between a scalper and an employee during an iPad 2 and white iPhone 4 launch.

Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based technology consultant, said the mobs were a result of Apple delaying products and limiting supplies to create a frenzy of demand.

"It's a conscious marketing strategy by Apple, and it's going to cause a problem because things are ridiculously out of control," he said. "Nobody can be happy with Apple today in Beijing."

Because the store limits customers' purchases, scalpers organize large groups to swarm product releases, hoping to resell the products at a cut above retail.

Buyers were reportedly recruited to queue at the Shanghai store Friday as well, promised a free breakfast and $15.

Even when a major release is not impending, flocks of men hawking iPhones and iPads have become a regular sight outside China's authorized Apple retailers. Scalpers made up much of the crowd Friday in Beijing. The eclectic group ranged from seniors from the countryside seeking their fortunes in the capital to high-school dropouts looking to make some quick cash. Some said that they had organized on Internet forums designed for temporary job seekers.

One member of the crowd, a film extra from Beijing, said he was offered about $20 to wait overnight for the phone. He said scalpers picked up hundreds like him in buses outside film studios where extras commonly work.

"After Apple said they were not selling the iPhones today, no organizers paid their temporary workers," said the man, who declined to give his name.

One man wearing a puffy red jacket said he had organized 500 buyers to wait overnight for the release. That was more than a rival group, he said.

"They have a lot of people, but we have more," said the man, who also declined to give his name. "They will be overwhelmed."

Just before the store was set to open, a guard announced through a megaphone that the coveted phone would not be sold. A brief moment of disbelieving silence was then broken by loud expletives and shouts of "Apple lied to us!" and "Open the door!"

Soon afterward, a man arrived with a bag of eggs, which he began handing out to the crowd. A space cleared, and moments later, gooey yolk dripped down the store's glass facade.

When the mall's property manager tried to intervene, a gang of men chased after him.

"I'm not an Apple employee, I'm a mall manager!" he shouted while trying to block punches and kicks.

By 9 a.m., police had managed to disperse the crowd and clear the square. Police could not be reached for comment.

A 60-year-old woman who gave only her surname, Chen, said the melee ruined her plans to give her son the latest iPhone for his birthday.

"There are so many people, and it's so cold, and now they say they won't sell us the phone," she said. "This is just so, so wrong."

Kaiman and Lee are special correspondents Times Staff Writer David Pierson in the Times' Beijing bureau contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

China strikes at West through pop culture wars

2012-01-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

China strikes at West through pop culture wars
By Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY

BEIJING – When Chinese leader Hu Jintao recently warned his nation's ruling Communist Party of an imminent risk from the West, he wasn't talking about the United States boosting its military capabilities in East Asia. He was alluding to things such as video games.

"International hostile forces" use thought and culture "to Westernize and split" China, Hu stated in a speech publicized in January in the party magazine Seeking Truth.

At least China's embattled youth can strike back at the West come May when Glorious Mission, a civilian version of the Chinese army's first training simulation game, goes on sale, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper. Co-developed by the People's Liberation Army, the online, first-person shooter game allows players to destroy enemies that resemble U.S. forces.

Glorious Mission and other "serious games" supported by Chinese authorities form one front in Beijing's multiheaded cultural offensive, launched last fall. There's been fighting talk from Hu's likely successor, Xi Jinping.

China's universities are "a key ideological front to equip our youth with the core values of socialism," he told the country's deans last week. Xi, 58, is likely to succeed Hu, 69, as party general secretary this year.

Through massive investment, and countless censors, the Communist Party aims to boost China's "soft power," or cultural influence, abroad and shore up "cultural security" at home by reinforcing state control of the sector and guiding audiences back to "socialist core values." Neither goal will come easily.

"The international culture of the West is strong while we are weak," Hu Jintao admitted.

China is the home of pandas and kung fu, yet it took Hollywood to make the smash-hit animated movie Kung Fu Panda, the sequel of which was China's most popular film in 2011. The fast-swelling ranks of young, urban consumers here have proved highly receptive to the pop culture of the USA and Asian neighbors South Korea and Japan.

State censors launch regular crackdowns, sometimes with bizarre targets: Last year, authorities restricted time-travel TV dramas and banned downloading of certain foreign pop songs, including The Backstreet Boys' seemingly non-political 1999 hit I Want It That Way.

In recent weeks, the government has stripped two-thirds of entertainment programs, mostly talent, talk and dating shows, from the schedules of China's popular satellite stations. Citing "excessive entertainment and a trend toward low taste," regulators have forced satellite channels to switch to programs promoting "traditional virtues and socialist core values," the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

Some viewers reject the changes.

"I can't understand why the government deprives us of the right to enjoy TV entertainment programs, as they are so mild and interesting," complains Zhu Qiansheng, 23, an unemployed graduate from Zhengzhou, central China.

As authorities shrink his options, Zhu has gone online for U.S. shows such as House and Prison Break and Chinese websites' own shows that dare to air "more open" content, he says.

"But I worry the Internet will also be more controlled this year," Zhu says.

The clamor of cultural rhetoric reflects the political atmosphere of this transition year for China's leadership, says Sheila Melvin, a U.S. writer working on a book exploring China's cultural rise. Some party analysts hope to buttress China's cultural strength against the Western culture they see spurring the "Arab Spring" revolutions and the collapse of another communist dictatorship, the Soviet Union. There's also a deeper, moral purpose, Melvin says.

"The Communist Party has inherited the ancient belief that culture transforms — exposure to high culture can make you a more moral person, exposure to low culture can cause you to behave immorally," she says. "The party sees the many problems in Chinese society and hopes to address them with culture; to some degree, it can be seen as a substitute for religion."

Grabbing the world's attention will remain a tough task unless the government relaxes its decades-long control of "cultural products," cautions Yin Hong, a professor of film and television studies at Beijing's Tsinghua University.

"The restrictions on culture always make it hard for China to produce world-influencing literature and cinema," writes China's most popular blogger, novelist Han Han.

Despite stiff odds, Chinese video game creator Linus Xin hopes his "serious games" achieve some impact by enlivening the ideology and morality classes every Chinese college student must take.

Being tested in the capital's colleges, the Emotional Quotient Gas Station game teaches students, often nervous and naive, how to tackle the opposite sex in a respectful manner, says Xin, CEO of Intellect Valley Communications.

China's Ministry of Culture promotes the "serious game" category, characterized by strong educational and moral messages, although Xin and fellow game developer Zheng Yaqi say they have not received funding support.

"I hope the name 'serious game' won't scare off players," says Zheng, CEO of Pipilu Culture and Technology, who is transforming the popular children's stories of his father, Zheng Yuanjie, into educational games. "Games can also show a country's soft power," says Zheng, who hopes U.S. players and readers will develop a taste for his dad's creations.

Online game fanatic Liu Bowen, 23, has never played a "serious game" and dismisses EQ Gas Station for its "boring and silly" name. But he looks forward to the PLA's Glorious Mission "if it's violent and bloody." Otherwise, "I have no interest."

"I don't think it's good for government to control or encourage which type of game we should play," Liu says.

Alec Ross egomania/self-promotion

2012-01-10T15:33:00.000-08:00

Alec Ross, State Department "new media guru," cannot stop talking about/promoting himself on Facebook. It's all about "me" and "I."

My father, a diplomat, always warned me -- he was being wonderfully ironic -- when I talked about myself: "Let's talk about something interesting, let's talk about me."

Mr. Ross, even if he has (I assume) an i-phone (note the "i"), needs a real-world lesson in humility. His parochial egomania has simply gotten boring to normal people.

The world is far more complicated than Mr. Ross or his sophomoric pronouncements about it, even if his simple-minded obiter dicta appear via the "new social media." See also.

"Humor" from New Media Guru Jared Cohen posted on Facebook

2012-01-10T11:41:00.000-08:00

"Humor" from New Media Guru and former State Department official Jared Cohen as posted by him on Facebook:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv9AUFpRGyc

Not a Reference to One of the Penguins

2012-01-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

Image, with caption: A British warship in the Falklands, from: Nile Gardiner, "Britain must condemn Argentina’s Falklands propaganda," blogs.telegraph.co.uk

Intriguing Article on PR and Public Diplomacy

2012-01-10T10:11:00.000-08:00

http://www.prconversations.com/index.php/2012/01/public-diplomacy-a-higher-calling-for-public-relations/

Washington Post - weirder and weirder

2012-01-06T04:08:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post presence on the internet is getting weirder and weirder. Has anyone told facebook fan Don Graham that his newspaper is becoming the joke of the town (country), no matter whose "terrific" (a favorite DG word by his avatar facebook personality referring to this paper's op-eds) political affiliation? Just take at look at the latest meaningless headline: "Iran’s sense of gloom contrasts with U.S. hope."

Christmas Trees

2012-01-06T02:10:00.000-08:00

As I walk up Sedgwick Street in Northwest Washington D.C., on my way home, I cannot help but be struck by the idiocy of "Christmas trees." Along the sidewalk, you see these abandoned, brutally cut-off miracles of God's splendor, supposedly ready to be picked up for ultimate destruction by city "services." A sad, in my view, commentary on America's ecological/global priorities.

Chinese-funded institutes raise concerns on U.S. campuses

2012-01-05T05:38:00.000-08:00

Chinese-funded institutes raise concerns on U.S. campusesBy Elizabeth Redden, USA Today

More than 300 colleges in more than 90 countries -- including about 70 institutions in the United States -- host Confucius Institutes, centers of Chinese language and culture education and research funded by China's government. The infusion of Chinese government funding into international universities has enabled significant expansions in language teaching, cultural programming, and China-related conferences and symposia, but it has also raised fears regarding academic freedom and independence of teaching and research. Critics have questioned why colleges would provide their imprimatur to institutes that have been described by Li Changchun, China's propaganda chief, as "an important part of China's overseas propaganda setup."

"If we had a U.S. government agency that was stating that it was a tool for U.S. government propaganda, my colleagues would be up in arms about having a center like that on campus," said Anne-Marie Brady, associate professor of political science at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. Brady, the editor of the recent volume, China's Thought Management (Routledge, 2011), said the space for criticism and inquiry at overseas Confucius Institutes is similar to that which Chinese citizens navigate: "They've got a lot of space, but the same kind of space that people have in China, which is that there are always no-go zones, and the no-go zones are obvious: Tibet, Taiwan, Falun Gong. And academia does not have no-go zones."

Other scholars, however, describe the fears regarding Confucius Institutes as, in their experiences, unfounded. "We've not ever had the experience of anybody telling us, 'Oh, don't talk about that,' or, 'This is a sensitive topic, avoid that,' and our position all along has been the minute that anybody does, we're done," said Ken Hammond, a professor of history and co-director of the Confucius Institute at New Mexico State University - which has hosted speakers who have addressed such topics as the history of Tibet and the Nationalist evacuation to Taiwan in 1949. "I wouldn't carry on a program where those constraints were placed upon me. That's not what I do. That's not why I got into this."

The first Confucius Institute in the United States was founded in 2004 at the University of Maryland at College Park. The expansion since then has been rapid: Columbia and Stanford Universities have Confucius Institutes, as do the Universities of Chicago and Michigan. Among the public universities with Confucius Institutes are the Universities of Alaska at Anchorage, Delaware, Hawaii at Manoa, Kansas, Massachusetts at Boston, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Texas at Dallas, Toledo, and Utah, as well as Middle Tennessee, Portland, Kennesaw, San Francisco, and Wayne State Universities. The State University of New York at Binghamton has a Confucius Institute dedicated to promoting Chinese opera. Some of the institutes are at universities with extensive programs and academic strength in Chinese studies, while others are not.

The Confucius Institutes are run in cooperation with Chinese partner universities and overseen by Hanban, a Chinese Ministry of Education subsidiary. Typically, host universities receive a yearly appropriation from Hanban -- in the range of $100,000 to $150,000 -- and Hanban also pays the salaries and travel costs for visiting Chinese instructors who staff the institutes. Hanban creates its own teaching materials.

The majority of Confucius Institutes focus primarily on language teaching and public outreach and programming. At New Mexico State, for example, the Confucius Institute is involved with outreach to local K-12 schools. The institute serves as a hub for 15 Chinese instructors - all of whom are funded by Hanban - who are teaching at nearby elementary, middle and high schools. The institute has also hosted conferences on the China-Mexico relationship and China in Africa. "New Mexico's a poor state," said Hammond. "There's not a lot of spare cash sloshing around here but we've been able to do things academically in terms of programming and involvement with the public schools that we never would have been able to do without this."

At North Carolina State University, the Confucius Institute offers non-credit language and cooking classes for local residents, as well as a one-credit Chinese conversation course, intended to supplement the foreign language department's offerings. The institute oversees three language teaching outposts, "Confucius Classrooms," at Central Carolina Community College, Saint Augustine's College, and Enloe High School, in Raleigh. Additionally, the Confucius Institute organized a professional association for North Carolina Chinese teachers and has worked with the College of Education at North Carolina State to develop a licensure program for teaching Chinese.

In a way, it's a one-stop China shop. "We're known as a mini China center here in the region, so if corporations want somebody to talk to about doing business in China, they contact us," said Bailian Li, vice provost for international affairs and director of the Confucius Institute. "If the public school wants to have an Asia day or a Chinese culture day, they contact us, so we send a teacher or a student to do show and tell."

The language teaching and outreach model is most common, but as more prestigious universities have signed on with Hanban, research-oriented Confucius Institutes have also developed. Stanford University, which established its Confucius Institute in 2009, received a $4 million gift from Hanban -- matched by Stanford - to fund an endowed professorship in Sinology, graduate student fellowships, and collaborative programming with Peking University. Richard Saller, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, said that during discussions of the gift a Hanban official expressed concern that the endowed professor might discuss "politically sensitive things, such as Tibet."

"This is something that comes up in other discussions with other donors of endowed chairs, and I said what I always say, which is we don't restrict the freedom of speech of our faculty, and that was the end of the discussion. I've had domestic donors walk away because of that, and in this case Hanban did not walk away."

"Given my experience, I don't see any kind of insidious or subversive tone to this," Saller said. "I think there is a genuine interest in trying to reach the best American universities." He added that when he was provost at the University of Chicago the French government established the France Chicago Center with a million dollar gift. "The consulate in Chicago was far more involved in trying to influence the nature of the programming for the purposes the French wanted to see, than Hanban has been for our program."

Academic Freedom and Soft Power

Objections to particular Confucius Institutes have emerged. For example, in 2010, 174 University of Chicago faculty members signed a letter that, among other things, objected to the establishment of a Confucius Institute in absence of Faculty Senate approval. The letter described the institute as "an academically and politically ambiguous initiative sponsored by the government of the People's Republic of China," and asserted that, "Proceeding without due care to ensure the institute's academic integrity, [the administration] has risked having the university's reputation legitimate the spread of such Confucius Institutes in this country and beyond."

This past spring, the faculty union at the University of Manitoba raised objections to a proposed Confucius Institute for academic freedom reasons. "Materials and instructors for CIs are selected and controlled by a branch of the government of the People's Republic of China," said Cameron Morrill, president of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association. "It is inappropriate to allow any government, either foreign or domestic, control over a university classroom regardless of how much money they offer."

The Canadian press also recently called attention to a provision in Hanban's hiring practices that discriminates against teaching candidates with a "record of participation in Falun Gong and other illegal organizations." The bylaws of the Confucius Institutes stipulate that "they shall not contravene concerning the laws and regulations of China."

Officials at Hanban did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Lionel M. Jensen, an associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures and a fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, writes critically of the Confucius Institutes in the forthcoming book, China In and Beyond the Headlines (Rowman and Littlefield, 2012): "[S]o far there have not been any events in which the academic freedom of the host university was explicitly threatened by authorities of Hanban. Most directors have gone on record in this regard to affirm the independence of their institutes. This, though, does not mean that U.S. Confucius Institute directors do not take special care in arranging programming that is uncontroversial in the eyes of their benefactor. By this I mean that their mindfulness of the funding source has affected consideration of what is appropriate programming. At its worst, this amounts to a persistent self-censorship, a practice common to the political survival experience of Chinese citizens today."

In an interview Jensen said his concerns about Confucius Institutes stem from the fact that, unlike other cultural institutes charged with promoting the study of language and culture of their countries, such as the Alliance Fran?aise, British Council, and the Goethe-Institut, Confucius Institutes are distinct for being located within institutions of higher education. "That in itself is astonishing," he said.

Jensen also has concerns about the quality of culture and language education offered through the Confucius Institutes. As he writes, the diversity of China's cultures has been reduced by Hanban to a "uniform, quaint commodity," characterized by Chinese opera and dance performances: "The term most appropriate for CI programming is 'culturetainment.' The concept gets at the abridgment of Chinese civilization in the name of digestible forms of cultural appeal that can be readily shipped overseas. To that extent, it is possible the Chinese-language education provided by CI will fall short of standard proficiency."

Scholars have characterized the Confucius Institutes as instruments of soft power, defined by the Harvard University political scientist Joseph Nye as "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals and policies." As James F. Paradise, a newly minted political science Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles who has published an article on Confucius Institutes and soft power explained, "The Chinese government has a broader agenda, which is to project a benign image of China in the international community, and a convenient way to do this is to establish these Confucius Institutes."

"It's not a bad thing to expose students to Chinese culture, but is it leading to an intrusion into American academic affairs?" Paradise asked. "I don't know if I would put it in such crude terms. I think the exercise of influence happens in a much subtler way. This is an example of public diplomacy, which the U.S. has used for years. During the Cold War, there were American centers around the world."

However, Brady, of the University of Canterbury, returned to the point that the Confucius Institutes are located within universities - and even subsidized by them, in the form of matching funds and overhead costs. "What they're promoting is a positive and benign image of Chinese society and Chinese political systems, and they are promoting Chinese language," she said. "They believe that if more people learn Chinese, they'll have more positive feelings toward China. There's nothing wrong with that. These are all similar activities as to what the British Council [for example] does, but the difference is that they're in universities and universities help to subsidize them, and why would we do that?"

Sources of Funding

Confucius Institute directors counter that Hanban provides them with the funding necessary to pursue programming of significant educational value. The University of Oregon has a Confucius Institute that sponsors events and symposia about China in a transnational context. Recent events include a lecture by a professor emeritus at Harvard on Deng Xiaoping, a folk music concert featuring musicians from the Central Music Conservancy, in Beijing, a panel discussion on Chinese foodways, and a symposium on China's role in regulating the global information economy. Hanban does not set the agenda: The institute puts out a call for proposals for projects each year, and the proposals are vetted by a board of faculty and administrators. "Especially since there's some suspicion of China and Chinese funding we want to make sure that everything we do is desired locally," said Bryna Goodman, the director of Oregon's Confucius Institute, a professor of history and director of Asian Studies. She said that the Confucius Institute sends an annual budget request to Hanban outlining the proposed projects; not once, she said, have Hanban officials raised any questions regarding the content of the programming proposed.

Goodman said that the funding from China provides a good counter-balance to other funding sources for China studies, including Taiwanese sources - such as the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange -- and U.S. government sources. "In terms of academic freedom, I would say the more sources you have the better, because you can go to different units to fund different things," she said.

"I would like a university that had enough independent funding so that everything could be independently funded, but that's not how universities work."

The influx of Confucius Institute dollars comes at a time when U.S. government funding. specifically National Resource Center funding for area and language studies, has been slashed by 47 percent. Paul Jacov Smith, a professor of history and East Asian studies at Haverford College, said he worries that some of the fears surrounding the Confucius Institutes mask frustrations about the U.S.'s own disinvestment in language and culture study. "While I do worry about the strings that often seem attached to CI funding, I think some of the more general concern is generated by the frustration that we in the U.S. feel as our ability to fund our own academic projects is eroded by the economic downturn," he said. "Our national power and prestige are under pressure right now, and I worry that could fuel unproductive resentments against China."

The University of Pennsylvania's Center for East Asian Studies is one of many National Resource Centers that's taken the hit. "We, like everybody else, are always looking for more funding and obviously when you lose funding you become more concerned about it," said Jacques deLisle, the Stephen A. Cozen professor of law and director of the center. The University of Pennsylvania previously rejected a proposed Confucius Institute that would have focused on K-12 outreach. "Personally, I think that proposal was too narrow and with the wrong kind of Chinese counterpart institution," deLisle said. Yet, deLisle said that while there are no active negotiations at this point, he is not closed to the possibility of pursuing a different sort of Confucius Institute. "I don't think it's fair to say that the reduction in federal funding triggered a sudden interest in the Confucius Institute or has transformed the likelihood that we will pursue one. But like every place that has not established one, or has made a firm decision not to establish one, we're looking around."

"One wants to have all the information one can about what kinds of options there are and what strings are attached to them," deLisle said.

David Prager Branner, a Chinese lexicographer and adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, said it is a fallacy to believe that "taking money from the Chinese government will have no long-term consequences."

"Of course, many of our universities are strapped for funds and the whole economics of American higher education is in the midst of changing drastically, so it's easy to look favorably on what seems to be a little easy money. At the same time, many universities have friendly relationships with institutions in China, so it's understandable that their administrators hope to do things to please the Chinese government."

"But I think this is like taking out a sub-prime mortgage or buying everything on credit without paying off the full debt: it may seem like a good deal at first but it will surely have consequences we may not be able to foresee at the outset. In order to try to anticipate those consequences we need to ask: why would China be willing to spend so much money to set these organizations up? Specifically why does China consider this to be in its national interest and why would it be in America's national interest?" Branner asked.

"I'm most concerned about what might happen in the long run," said Matthew Sommer, an associate professor of Chinese history at Stanford. "The program seems to be expanding exponentially in the United States and around the world, and inevitably it's going to have an increasing influence on the way Chinese studies is taught in the U.S. and elsewhere. It's not so much what might happen right now, but what might happen 15 years from now, or 20 years from now."

Too Big to Know

2012-01-01T06:29:00.000-08:00

What lies beneath
The Internet hasn’t changed our concept of truth as much as some theorists claim

By Evgeny Morozov Sunday, January 1, 2012

“Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room”
by David Weinberger
Basic Books, $14.29

Karl Popper, a towering figure in 20th century philosophy of science, firmly opposed the view that theories emerge from random observations. Once he even ridiculed a hypothetical scientist “who dedicated his life to natural science, wrote down everything he could observe, and bequeathed his priceless collection of observations to the Royal Society to be used as inductive evidence.” For Popper, “though beetles may profitably be collected, observations may not.”

David Weinberger, the author of “Too Big to Know” and a Harvard researcher, doesn’t mention Popper. But his rejoinder is easy to predict: Popper’s theory of knowledge was conditioned and constrained by the medium he used to develop it. Had Popper stopped worrying about limited paper supply and embraced today’s world of hyperlinks and infinite storage, even the most inconsequential of observations would look like knowledge to him.

Weinberger wants to be the Marshall McLuhan of knowledge management. Where McLuhan claimed that the medium shapes the reception of the message, Weinberger claims that the medium also shapes what counts as knowledge. Or, as he himself puts it, “transform the medium by which we develop, preserve, and communicate knowledge, and we transform knowledge.”

How does this happen? Weinberger argues that on the Internet facts are born “linked,” pointing to other facts and opinions. With time, other entities start linking to them, creating digital traces that can be used to scrutinize and even revise original facts.

On paper, facts look firm and reliable; online, they are always in flux. Furthermore, the Internet, unlike your local library, is infinite. Librarians choose which books to acquire; books that don’t make the cut become invisible. Not so with search engines. What they filter out doesn’t disappear — it stays in the background. New filters, Weinberger claims, don’t “filter out” but “filter forward.”

This triumph of the “networked” and the “hyperlinked” unsettles everything: facts (those who think that Barack Obama was born in Kenya also have facts), books (they are unable to contain “linked” and infinite knowledge) and even knowledge itself (it’s too obsessed with theories and consensus-seeking). Thus, “knowledge has become a network with the characteristics — for better and for worse — of the Net.”

This is an ambitious thesis. It’s also not original. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” a famous 1979 book by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, makes a similar claim about computerization. “Along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as ‘knowledge statements,’” wrote Lyotard. Weinberger doesn’t mention Lyotard by name but claims that “the Internet showed us that the postmodernists were right.”

Too bad, then, that his argument is ridden with familiar postmodernist fallacies, the chief of which is his lack of discipline in using loaded terms like “knowledge.” This term means different things in philosophy and information science; the truth of a proposition matters in the former but not necessarily in the latter. Likewise, sociologists of knowledge trace the social life of facts, often by studying how and why people come to regard certain claims as “knowledge.” The truth of such claims is often irrelevant.

For epistemologists, however, to say that “S knows that p” three conditions must be met. P must be true; S must believe that p; S must be justified in believing that p. One can’t “know” that “Barack Obama was born in Kenya” because it’s untrue. On the other hand, to “know” that “Barack Obama was born in Hawaii,” one needs to have justification. A copy of his birth certificate would do. The hyperlink nirvana has not rid us of the justification requirement. The Internet may have altered the context in which justification is obtained — one can now link to Obama’s birth certificate — but it hasn’t changed what counts as “knowledge.”

That scientific facts today are no longer persuasive on their own has less to do with our changing attitudes toward knowledge than with our changing attitudes — marked by suspicion of power, expertise and claims to neutrality — toward science as a socio-political enterprise. Postmodernists foresaw some of these changes, but Weinberger overstates their contribution. The sociology of scientific knowledge and science studies played a more consequential role. These two disciplines have posed valid challenges to traditional epistemology, but Weinberger is too impatient to position his argument within that debate, at times invoking claims from both camps but never stating his own theory of truth (thus, he can simultaneously claim that “truth will remain truth” and that “knowledge is becoming ... unthinkable without ... the network that enables it”). Such carelessness stems from Weinberger’s fixation on media and its history, a fixation that comes at the expense of engaging with other fields and disciplines studying the production of knowledge. He may be right that the notion of “objectivity” is dead in journalism. It is, however, very much alive in science.

Many of Weinberger’s other claims fall apart on closer examination. Does Hunch.com, a site that asks users hundreds of questions to predict what movies or books they might like, exemplify “a serious shift in our image of what knowledge looks like”? Hunch.com uses techniques of statistics, data mining and machine learning to turn correlations into recommendations. All of these, of course, are well-established disciplines predating the Internet. For Weinberger, the claim that “75% of people who liked ‘Mad Men’ also liked ‘Breaking Bad’” is revolutionary because, unlike Darwin’s theory of evolution, it is “theory-free.” However, such “theory-free knowledge” has a very long history. Think of census reports, surveys or marketing questionnaires. Yes, people fill in these forms online now. But is this somehow revolutionary?

Weinberger does have an annoying penchant for finding novelty in things simply because they exist online. Thus, he invokes PolitiFact.com — a prominent journalistic project that fact-checks what public figures say — to argue that the Internet is also capable of countering misinformation. What an odd choice: PolitiFact.com, as it happens, is not run from a geek’s basement. It’s run by St. Petersburg Times, a card-carrying member of the old knowledge regime. Yes, it operates online. But the claim that PolitiFact can therefore tell us something about “the Internet” is highly suspicious.

In the end, it’s hard to say what this book is about. Weinberger is too incurious to interrogate the modern state of knowledge or explain which of our current attitudes toward it are driven by the Internet and which by other social dynamics. And it’s certainly not a book about technology: Weinberger distances himself from this topic, and his shallow treatment of online filters suggests it was a wise decision. In the end, perhaps, this might be a book about the prospect of yet another digital revolution — a revolution so vague that no one would blame Weinberger if it fails to materialize.

Evgeny Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, is the author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom"
(PublicAffairs)

Losing It

2012-01-01T04:12:00.000-08:00

Raging Against Aging by Henry Allen, Wall Street Journal [review of Losing It By William Ian Miller Yale, 328 pages, $27]

In 1981, five days before cancer killed him, the life-loving writer William Saroyan told the Associated Press: "Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"

There it is: "Now what?"

That is the great question growing all the greater for being asked by the biggest, most self-conscious and possibly most self-deluded generation in American history, the baby boomers.

The youngest of them are middle-aged now, taking a hard-headed look at old age and asking: Now what? Some are also taking a soft-headed look, as if they were already demented beyond grappling with reality. Some of them like to think of old age as "elderhood," which is thinking of old age as just another stage of life, like childhood or adulthood.

But then what? Surely not deathhood. Or afterhood, or oblivionhood. No, a lot of people are making a lot of money promising immortality. But I digress. Then again, digression is the essence of William Ian Miller's book about old age. It answers the question of "Now what?" with its title: "Losing It."

Mr. Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, says that he is losing it himself, but he continues to teach property law when he isn't teaching law students about Icelandic sagas, which are his first love. (One of his courses is called "Bloodfeuds.") He has written earlier books about disgust and humiliation. He is in his 60s, he says, but seems to deliberately annoy the reader by never giving his exact age. He is a prankster, a tease, an imp of the perverse, a digressor-transgressor.

The book's first line serves as a warning to the reader: "Digression, cast adrift on the buoyant Dead Sea of your own narrations, is a sign of old age . . . the natural decay of the aging brain." The claim could be made that not since Laurence Sterne's great 18th-century joke of a novel, "Tristram Shandy," has any book been so well-founded on the slippery rock of digression.

The point, if I may dare to sum up: Old age is an annoying, ridiculous and pathetic decline toward the state of a turnip softening in a compost heap, if death is not kind enough to intervene first.

But why write a book about it?

Besides looking for an excuse to discuss Icelandic sagas, Mr. Miller wants to express his contempt for the positivity crowd that echoes "grow old along with me, the best is yet to be," in the words of Robert Browning, one of the softer turnips of 19th-century English poetry.

Most boomers, beneath whatever faith they have in free radical therapy or green tea, know the lonely and painful disappointments that await them. They read the necrologies in their alumni bulletins before they look at the class notes, then realize that they can no longer remember who the dead ones were. They are called "spry," or even worse, "well-preserved." White-haired, with hands fisted to hide tremors, they hate the store clerks who ask, "What can I do for you today, young lady?" Mechanics working on their old pickup trucks give them an actuarial once-over and then say: "Take care of this baby and it'll last you the rest of your life."

Mr. Miller makes sure to take all hope away from us, condemning "the positivity psychologists" who promise a glorious, sensual, wise, healthy and virtuous old age. He says that the fields they practice in—self-help, mystical geriatrics, cyber-techno-immortality—are "either culpably moronic or a swindle, one in which its purveyors, it seems, believe their own cons."

Instead, he says, life in old age "is a desperate struggle not to be laughed at, sneered at, or looked down upon." As an example, he asks: "What of my clearly decaying scholarly capacities? . . . I can't even reliably come up with words like 'refrigerator' or 'kitty litter' and must endure my wife's hand gesture of irritated contempt to 'get on with it.' Can I ever get lost in a book again without my mind wandering?"

He provides no cheering statistics, medical reports, predictions of scientific miracles, or celebrations of wisdom and the joys of grandparenting, and he does not bother to refute those who do, except by insulting them.

But now what?

The boomers listen to endless prophecies that it won't be death. After all, a defining trait of boomers is to believe that they are somehow exempt from squalor, failure, decrepitude or fate. (I can make my own position clear: As a Vietnam veteran I feel, at 70, as if I have been transferred to a unit in which all the troops are walking wounded and their killed-in-action rate will be 100%.)

In 1992, I heard Timothy Leary, once a boomer saint and father of the LSD movement in America, tell a crowd: "Death? Get that one out of your appointment book." Fear of death was to be scorned. Death wasn't hip. Leary's hipness expired of prostate cancer in 1996.

Had he changed his mind by then? Not really: He had thought about cryonics, freezing his body to await revival by more advanced scientists. But, for whatever reason, he settled for having his ashes fired into space. After six years, the rocket fell out of orbit.

Nowadays there are predictions of decrepitude-free eternal life—perpetual elderhood—through cyborgian implants, restoration therapies, genome sequencing, cellular age-reversal work-ups and trans-humanism. The futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil has written a book called "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever." He suggests that at a moment called the "singularity," perhaps 20 or 30 years from now, science will be able to stop, and then reverse, aging. He plans to resurrect his dead father using artificial intelligence and DNA.

There are many more prophets like him winning believers and making money, as one always can by promising eternal life. Maybe after elderhood we won't have death, just more stages of elderhood, perhaps dignified with Roman numerals, like Super Bowls: Elderhood XXVII . . . I can no longer remember how to read Roman numerals that get that high.

But I digress. The real point of "Losing It" is that it gives Mr. Miller an opportunity to play one joke after another on the reader, who can elect to be in on the joke or, possibly, throw the book across the room. The hell with you if you can't take the joke, he seems to say.

He delights in tangling us in morbid logic and including passages so complicated, irrelevant or boring that they become interesting, even admirable, as proof of mankind's capacity for pernicious whimsy. On any given page you may find Mr. Miller taking you through Dostoyevsky's "Underground Man," Slavic word roots, television's "The Wire" and of course his beloved Icelandic sagas.

Mr. Miller gives Talmudic scrutiny to the terrible paradoxes of life, bringing up impotence and then somehow digressing to medieval nobles who had no such problem but instead were sated with endlessly available sex and in their soul-sickness joined the church. "Yet, perversely, once the vow of chastity was taken, the thrill would be restored to what earlier had been tiresome luxury," he writes. "The paradox is that having given it up, you now had it to give up."

I am not sure what any of this has to do with losing it in old age. I'm not sure Mr. Miller cares.

Particularly piquant is the author's explanation of the common law's Rule Against Perpetuities, which would seem to limit restrictions that a dead man may place on his heirs, but only a layman could put it that simply. Even as a law professor, Mr. Miller concedes the rule to be nearly unexplainable. He then futilely explains it for five pages to prove the point, winding up with a lurch into a gloss on Ecclesiastes 9:5, "but the dead know nothing," which somehow brings up a tale from what turns out to be the Babylonian Talmud—check the footnote, which has its own digression into Hrapp, a character in one of those Icelandic horror stories.

There are no case histories or celebrities in this book, but there are many people with names like Kveld-Ulf, Anskar and Constantine the African. Six of the most boring pages I have ever read describe the last words of King David (see Samuel 23:1-7) as well as his dealings with Abner, the son of Ner, Amasa, the son of Jether, and Shimei and Barzillai—so tedious, these Torah-borers, that they're fascinating, an enormous joke, along the lines of the famous Ben Stein economics lecture in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

Mr. Miller cites Pancho Villa, who is said to have said while dying: "Don't let it end like this, tell them I said something." Mr. Miller points out that Villa "gets credit for making a superb joke at the expense of the art of dying and its demand for famous last words. That kind of witticism, however, was not what he intended at all. He was playing it straight, anguished that he had bungled his end by not coming up with . . . some pithy statement."

In the last line of the book, Mr. Miller describes a colleague cutting him off in mid-sentence and asking: "Do you want me . . . to let you know when you are repeating yourself? Or would you prefer that I let it slide?"

He doesn't give his answer—the question is as full of traps as "Have you stopped beating your wife?" But there are so many questions like that in old age, and Mr. Miller savors them all in the spirit of a man lying awake and seeking out a sore tooth with his tongue. As he pondered that one from his colleague, he might have gone back to Saroyan's: "Now what?"

A final confession: This whole disquisition on Mr. Miller's book has been a digression. I could have just cited the book's title and left it at that, a title written in 18th-century style for whatever reason: "LOSING IT—in which an aging professor laments his shrinking BRAIN, which he flatters himself formerly did him Noble Service, a Plaint, tragi-comical, historical, vengeful, sometimes satirical and thankful in six parts, if his Memory does yet serve."

And so we end at Mr. Miller's beginning, a mind-twister I'm sure he'd enjoy.

—Mr. Allen, a former writer and editor for the Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000.

The Joy of Quiet

2011-12-31T08:23:00.000-08:00

December 29, 2011
The Joy of Quiet, By Pico Iyer, New York Times

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

The author, most recently, of “The Man Within My Head.”

Important article on the new social media and the Arab Spring

2011-12-29T08:12:00.000-08:00

OP-ED
This Spring Breeze Did Not Arise in the West
Emad Mekay*

(JB Note: The below important article on the Arab Spring rings true to me; I am not a Middle East expert, but I recall that during my three-year diplomatic posting in Belgrade in the mid-90s, when anti-Milosevic demonstrations broke out, foreign journalists (and particularly American ones) tended to attribute these "we-can't-take-it anymore'' manifestations to the then-new communicative powers of the internet, specifically e-mail. Indeed, western media reporters chararacterized these expressions of popular dissatisfaction with the "Slobo" regime as the first "internet revolution." But anyone who stayed in Belgrade for more than a few days realized -- as many press luminaries parachuted there to "cover" the ground-breaking events there did not -- that Serbs took to the streets for far more basic reasons than having shared e-mails. Sure, young computer-savvy Serbs used the Internet to throw "electronic eggs" at the authorities, and the dissident radio station B-92 turned to the internet as a broadcasting tool when it was banned from the airwaves. But use of new media was only the tip of an iceberg of deep dissent: Serbs in the capital were angry with social, economic, political conditions that few foreign journalists, understood, including Serb antI-Americanism. And, as anyone who actually witnessed the demos could tell, the most meaningful communication among protesters took place not in the virtual world, but in the streets of Belgrade, in face-to-face discussions, at meetings and rallies. It was, above all, a human, rather than electronic, rebellion, at a time when, granted, the distiction between "human" and "electronic" was sharper than it is today.

PALO ALTO, California, U.S., Dec 23 (IPS) - So here I am, an Arab journalist in Silicon Valley, where four out of every four people I meet believe Facebook invented the Arab Spring. Three more weeks here and I may start to hallucinate that Mark Zuckerberg was a Cairo-slums native named Hassouna El-Fatatri, who rotted in a Mubarak prison for advocating personal privacy rights.

I understand that some Western institutions that feign Middle East expertise were brutally debunked when they miserably failed to predict the wave of changes in the region from early December of last year. Western intelligence, think-tanks, diplomats, TV pundits and certainly some journalists were at a loss for words.

To compensate for that, some Western connection had to be conjured up. The inaccurate role of different Western establishments in the Arab Spring, this time social media, was conjured up.

The smart marketing gimmick was so powerful that some 10 months later, Western circles now give little or no credit to the indigenous Arab social change mechanisms that have so far kept Arab revolutions raging for a year now.

The tools Arabs used were not mainly Google, Facebook or Twitter. They were simply their own I-Revolt apps.

One of the most potent native tools in organising mass protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen and, occasionally, in other Arab countries was not Facebook or Twitter but "Friday-book dot come rally now".

If that doesn't ring a bell, just Google "Friday of Rage," "Friday of Liberation" or the "Friday of Departure" among many other Fridays.

Friday noon prayers where hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people customarily gather every week, have been the most shared feature of the Arab Spring uprisings. The weekly congregations were in fact the main hub for bringing protesters out to the streets – not because of their spiritual value but because of their ability to gather people with no or little extra effort.

Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the internet in general may have helped with some of the initial rallying calls in the 85 million people nation of Egypt for the Jan. 25 protest. But it was Friday Jan. 28 that saw the birth of the real revolution in Egypt and the subsequent domino effect in other countries.

Fridays were not a reason. They were just an I-revolt app – a good handy one.

A second ergonomic, user-friendly Arab-gadget was the good old A-4 white-paper flyer, handwritten or on rare occasions typed, designating places to assemble and protest. That one was a favourite for leaders of the labour movement in Mahala Al-Kobra, home of Egypt's important textiles industry, and for disgruntled maritime workers in the Suez Canal.

Threats of labour strikes were instrumental in bringing the military – which was fearful of a complete national shutdown - to eventually side with the people in Egypt.

Another tool I saw used to keep the fervour going was the simple word of mouth over landline telephones from mostly panicky family members reporting to their loved ones how unfit Mubarak's brutal ways had become.

You add to that mix the role played by the 24-hour pan-Arab TV news, especially from the Mubarak-bashing Aljazeera, BBC Arabic, Al-arabiya and even the U.S.-funded Al-Hurra, in spreading the word and you'll get a realistic sense of what a limited role social media outlets had on the ground.

In fact, the entire internet was made useless when Mubarak cracked down and cut off all communications - without that denting people's ability to plan and organise one bit.

The Facebook claims also do not explain why, for example, there is no sign of revolt or even political activism in the United Arab Emirates, which, according to the Dubai School of Government, in December 2010 had the highest Facebook penetration rate in the Arab region, with more than 45 percent of the population having Facebook accounts. On the eve of the revolution, Egypt had a rate of only five percent.

Now, in Syria and Yemen – which have much lower Internet penetration and exposure to Western influence - protests are raging like wildfire. And it is not Facebook that's gathering them. It's the local naturally automated software such as Friday congregations, word-of-mouth, flyers, telephone landlines, family relations and TV.

The videos on YouTube and the many pictures posted on other networking sites were, and still are, important indeed, but only for documenting what was happening and letting the outside world get the word. And did that help during the early days of the Arab Spring? Well, no.

Western capitals had originally slumbered through the Tunisian revolution until ousted president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali was almost at the door. And when Western powers finally noticed, in a way thanks to social media, their initial knee-jerk reaction was to try to keep Stooge 0.1 Ben Ali and Stooge 0.2 Mubarak from crashing.

So for now, to get accurate analysis and, subsequently helpful policy recommendations towards the Arab Spring, Western institutions need to take a deep breath, read about courage in admitting failures, stop trying to take credit for something they didn't do, and look hard and deep into what really happened in the Arab region.

Maybe for a change they will be able to see things in the Middle East for what they really were. In that case, it was for sure their Friday-book, not Facebook.

*Emad Mekay is a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He worked for The New York Times, Bloomberg News and Inter Press Service in the Middle East. He is the founder of America In Arabic News Agency. He covered most of the initial protests of the Arab Spring for The International Herald Tribune and for Inter Press Service.

(END/2011)

Carlos A. Garcia-Perez response to John Layfield, foxbusiness.com, re Office of Cuba Broadcasting; pertains to Public Diplomacy

2011-12-27T10:53:00.000-08:00

Below item kindly provided by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, in response to Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review citation of Mr. Layfield's commentary

December 20, 2011
Mr. John Layfield
Commentator
c/o Caley Cronin
Media Relations
Email: Caley.Cronin@foxbusiness.com
Fox Business News

Dear Mr. Layfield:

Next time you’re fishing for bonefish in the Florida Keys, please be assured that any transmission balloon you see is not broadcasting programming of the Martis. U.S. sponsored broadcasting to Cuba through Radio and TV Marti stopped transmitting via aerostat in 2005.

The current budget for the Office of Cuba Broadcasting is about $28 million -- less than half the $60 million figure you cited. And we do not treat Cuba “differently than every regime in the world.” US international broadcasting – now in 58 languages, reaching 187 million people weekly around the globe -- focuses much of its attention on exactly that – “regimes” that deny their populations basic human rights including the free flow of information and participation in the political process. Cuba is among the most repressive of these regimes, and its people deserve the efforts OCB makes to provide them the accurate information they need to inform their daily lives about their country, their leadership, and events around the world.

Just as communications efforts to the Soviet bloc were jammed during the Cold War, many regimes continue to attempt to block information flows through radio, television, the Internet, and mobile devices. During the Cold War, information from VOA and RFE/RL leaked through the Iron Curtain. Today, information from OCB finds its way to audiences by radio, satellite, email, and the Internet. None of these delivery systems is perfect. The Cuban Government seeks to block each of them. But our information reaches the island, supports the work of Cuban bloggers and dissidents, and is shared via DVDs, thumb drives, and other devices. How do we know this? First and foremost because the Cuban people are telling us so, in a steady stream of phone calls and emails from the island. It is true that the repressive environment in Cuba is not conducive to market surveys performed by the USG. Cubans are unlikely to answer a cold phone call and admit that they listen to the Martis, banned by the Cuban government. And among the 17% of Cubans who are lucky enough to own phones, many are government officials more likely to support government censorship efforts. Qualitative research consistently suggests widespread fear of acknowledging use of foreign media or of illegal reception methods. Without having the ability to do on-the-ground surveys, BBG has few options to produce a credible survey that would reflect Cuban listenership.

Still, we are not operating in an information vacuum. BBG’s Office of Research continues to study and test alternative approaches to measuring reach in telephone surveys, with pilot questions on other surveys and in qualitative research with Cubans recently arrived in the U.S.

BBG has conducted several waves of surveys of Cubans recently-arrived to South Florida, along with expanded qualitative studies (focus groups, monitoring panels) to explore their experiences in using foreign media, and specifically Radio and TV Martí, as well as their views of the Martís’ unique value and programming. While these studies cannot be used to estimate behaviors among mass publics in Cuba, they do indicate use of Radio and TV Martí at levels higher than appeared in the 2008 phone survey.

Eager to have news and information that they can’t get from local media sources, audiences are willing to listen through the jamming and brave the danger of listening to stations that are illegal in Cuba. Their efforts are something akin to climbing Mt. Everest. We understand and value their compulsion to climb.

Sincerely,

Carlos A. Garcia-Perez
Director
Office of Cuba Broadcasting
Radio/TV Marti
Telephone: 305-427-7026

One nation, under Gods

2011-12-26T00:45:00.000-08:00

One nation, under Gods: Far from turning our backs on religion, today's Americans are religiously fluid. And that's a good thing - Eric Weiner, latimes.com, December 25, 2011

Nearly half a century ago Time magazine famously asked: Is God Dead? The verdict is in. God is definitely not dead — the United States remains a highly religious nation — but God has diversified, and in ways the cheeky headline writers of 1966 couldn't have imagined. We're a spiritually promiscuous nation, increasingly so, and while this is, on balance, a good thing, it also poses certain dangers. It's one thing to explore different faiths, and something else entirely to hop aimlessly from one to another, bolting for the door when the going gets tough. (And it always gets tough.)

It's commonly believed that this spiritual restlessness is a relatively recent phenomenon, born of the cultural tumult of the 1960s, but it's a lot older than that. The 19th century transcendentalists — Emerson, Thoreau and others — borrowed heavily from Eastern thought, and we've been borrowing, and God-hopping, ever since. Today, at least a third of us will change our religious affiliation over the course of our lifetimes, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Never before have so many people been free to choose their religion, and at so little risk. "Heresy" is based on the Greek root meaning "to choose for one's self." We are all heretics now.

It's easy to dismiss all this God-hopping as the spiritual equivalent of consumerism run amok — a sort of Black Friday of the soul. That may be true in some cases, but overall I think it is a healthy phenomenon. No longer are we shackled to the religion of our birth or our community. We are free to choose, and remarkably we tend not to choose the easiest path. The most popular religions are not faddish cults that preach an anything-goes hedonism but, rather, those that make great demands on their followers. Calvinism, for instance, is enjoying a resurgence. Buddhism is also hugely popular, and it can hardly be described as easy, as anyone who has tried to still their mind for five minutes can attest. When much is asked, much is given.

Another result of this "theodiversity" is that while we may live in political silos — apart and rarely mixing — we do not live in religious ones. Few Americans have religiously homogenous families, friends and neighbors, according to David Campbell of Notre Dame University. "If you add to your friends someone of another faith, you become warmer toward that faith," he says, and, crucially, warmer to people of all faiths. Tolerance breeds tolerance.

We also cross religious lines much more easily than political ones. More than a third of Americans in the Pew survey say they attend religious services at more than one place, and sometimes at a different faith from their own.

Not only are we a religiously fluid nation, we're also a porous one. Beliefs, for instance, once considered exclusive to the New Age movement have seeped into the mainstream. Twenty percent of Christians, and slightly more of the public overall, say they believe in reincarnation, according to Pew. An equal percentage believe in astrology and in yoga — not only as exercise but as a spiritual practice.

The point is not that we've all gone Shirley MacLaine but, rather, that religions are constantly borrowing from one another, whether they acknowledge it or not. There is no such thing as a "pure" religion. All faiths are hybrids, to one degree or another, and we are better off for it. We recognize familiar themes in religions otherwise alien to us and are more likely to be accepting of the "other."

Amid this landscape, many people are looking for a faith that fits, though not always finding it. The fastest-growing religious group is the "nones," those who refuse to claim any affiliation. The "nones," are not, for the most part, atheists. They are the religious equivalent of political undecideds. They have yet to hear a compelling argument for one faith or another but would love nothing more than to be swept off their feet.

For St. Augustine, it was the words of a child — "pick it up and read it" — that transformed his life from one of degradation to piety and bliss. Leo Tolstoy and John Bunyan are other examples of the sudden conversion, prompted by a personal crisis.

The more common type of conversion — and the one more likely to stick — is the gradual variety. In Katmandu, I met one such convert, James Hopkins. Born into a traditional Presbyterian family, he never felt like he fit in. His religion didn't speak to him. In Augustinian fashion, he stumbled across a book about Buddhism, but it took years of study — and questioning — before he converted. Buddhism, he told me, has made him a better person. He's less angry, more compassionate. Consciously or not, he adheres to Pragmatism, a philosophy that skirts sticky ontological questions and concludes simply that, as William James put it, "Truth is what works."

With so many choices out there, though, it's easy to get "lost in the jungle of possibilities," as one Hindu holy man put it. And choosing a religion, of course, is not the same as choosing a new car or a calling plan. The stakes are higher. And so is the cost. Seekers must be willing to sacrifice. Otherwise, their seeking is reduced to just another form of narcissism. The worst kind, perhaps, because it is disguised as something noble.

Carl Jung, something of a God-hopper himself, saw the risks inherent in this excess of spiritual possibilities. "Modern man tries on a variety of religions and beliefs as if they were Sunday attire, only to lay them aside again like worn-out clothes." Or, to put it another way: We have commitment issues. When one path proves incompatible, we switch to another (and there is always another).

God-hoppers are, at their worst, spiritual dilettantes. At their best, they are experimenters, in the tradition of Gandhi. He took an almost scientific approach to his spiritual experimentation, carefully noting the effects of a certain practice, such as fasting or meditation, then making adjustments, then repeating. Gandhi also borrowed liberally from Christian theology, unapologetically plucking grains of wisdom wherever he found them.

In that sense, he was very American.

Eric Weiner is the author, most recently, of "Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine."

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

American Nietzsche

2011-12-25T06:24:00.000-08:00

Stranger in a Strange Land

By THOMAS MEANEY, Wall Street Journal [Review of American Nietzsche
By Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Chicago, 452 pages, $30]

As a teenager, Friedrich Nietzsche was fascinated by America. "The American way of laughing does me good," he wrote after reading "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "especially this sort of sturdy seaman like Mark Twain." In the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson he discovered a "brother-soul" who kindled his lifelong passion for truth-seeking. Despite making his name as the greatest anti-democratic thinker of his age, Nietzsche believed that America was a land of free spirits, unburdened by the weight of the European past.

American readers, for their part, have repaid Nietzsche's attentions. More than any other European thinker, he is alive in our cultural bloodstream. But in a country that, from the start, elevated the values of efficiency and equality over the virtues of aristocratic excellence, Nietzsche's message was bound to mutate. We have blunted his challenge to "create yourself" into a commercial catchphrase; we prefer to "like" our fellow citizens rather than to love or hate them; we don't hesitate to declare any child who dabbles in crayons an "artist." As a culture, we have given Nietzsche a happy ending.

What does our use and abuse of Nietzsche's thinking say about us? This is the interesting question that Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen sets out to answer in "American Nietzsche," her elegant and revealing account of America's reckoning with the German thinker. She samples the gamut of responses to Nietzsche in an effort to explain how nearly every segment of American culture "discovered in Nietzsche a thinker to think with."

For American thinkers wrestling with the anxieties unleashed by living in a pluralist democracy, Nietzsche not only diagnosed the mentality more acutely than anyone else but for his careful readers—those with "a third ear"—also promised forms of higher fulfillment.

For Nietzsche, as for Emerson, the source of this fulfillment was to be found in a radically new conception of the individual. The self was not a stable entity for Nietzsche, nor was there any "true self" to be discovered. Rather the self is something that we are constantly becoming. "We shed our old bark, we shed our skins every spring," Nietzsche writes, "we keep becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger." We construct ourselves by assembling our experiences, desires and actions in the way a novelist gives coherence to the incidental plot points of a novel. "Make your own Bible!" declares Emerson. For both Nietzsche and Emerson the point was to generate meaning through a continuous act of self-creation.

Nietzsche's first American popularizer was the journalist H.L. Mencken, who was drawn to Nietzsche's European exoticism. Nevertheless, Mencken understood clearly enough that the self-created individuals that Nietzsche described could never arise easily in a democracy, where the self-creation of one citizen inevitably treads on the self-creation of another. In his 1908 book, "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche," Mencken excoriated the way that American mass society trampled on the possibility of unadjusted heroes. "It is only the under-dog . . . that believes in equality," he seethed, "it is only the mob that seeks to reduce all humanity to one dead level, for it is only the mob that would gain by such leveling."

Mencken reviled American culture for not producing more genuine artists to match their European counterparts. "The culture of the Renaissance raised itself on the shoulders of a group of a hundred men," Nietzsche wrote, and it was such a cultural avant-garde that Mencken aimed to cultivate.

Mencken's columns put Nietzsche's name on the American cultural map, and the philosopher's ideas provoked murmurs of enthusiasm among a coterie of readers. But Nietzsche's reputation never got off the ground with the general public in the early decades of the 20th century. The first reason was the sensational trial, in 1924, of Leopold and Loeb, who kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy, apparently under the influence of Nietzsche (or so claimed Clarence Darrow, Loeb's defense attorney). The second, more significant, reason was the rise of fascism in Europe.

It was one thing for American intellectuals and academics to invoke Nietzsche in their criticism of liberal democracy when its values seemed to be secure, but it was a considerably less welcome exercise in the 1930s, when those values were on the defensive. In the lead up to the war with Germany, Nietzsche's philosophy became hopelessly conflated with Nazism, though this association was the result of superficial reading. (Anti-Semitism, for instance, was one of Nietzsche's favorite examples of German stupidity.)

It was left to the German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann to rehabilitate Nietzsche's reputation after World War II. In the best chapter of her book, Ms. Ratner-Rosenhagen explains how the Nietzsche we encounter in print today is largely Kaufmann's Nietzsche—mediated by his translations, collations and introductions. Kaufmann became not only Nietzsche's tireless promoter but also, to a degree, the sanitizer of his thought.

By arguing for Nietzsche's place in the Western canon alongside Kant and Hegel, Kaufmann made his subject respectable enough for the college classroom. He was also responsible for recasting Nietzsche as the forerunner of the various strains of existentialism that came into vogue in the 1960s. Nietzsche was suddenly a cultural touchstone with disciples ranging from Hugh Hefner to the Black Panther Huey Newton (the latter apparently misunderstood what Nietzsche meant by "slave morality" and thought it might be a good thing).

If there is a problem with "American Nietzsche," it is that Ms. Ratner-Rosenhagen is not quite up-front about the story she is telling. She claims at the outset that her study "is not even a book about Nietzsche"—and that, in the spirit of her subject, she will be merely presenting us with a series of interpretations in order to understand Nietzsche's "role in the ever-dynamic remaking of modern thought." But the last chapter of her book shows her to be partial to a very particular way of reading her subject. The chapter is devoted to three American Nietzscheans—Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty—who all rediscovered American transcendentalism through Nietzsche and whose inclusion at the end of the book makes Nietzsche's thought seem like a long detour on the way back home to Emerson.

But Messrs. Cavell and Rorty have domesticated Nietzsche in peculiar ways, often sidestepping the main difficulties he presents. For Rorty, for instance, the challenge Nietzsche posed for a democratic culture could be solved by simply signing on to everything he says about the self but quarantining the rest of his unpalatable anti-democratic pronouncements. Nietzsche's two great contributions to American culture, according to Rorty, were that he provided us with an example of how we can all make an art of our private lives and that he showed us that the truth, far from having any absolute value, is simply whatever we find useful. When it comes to our democratic foundations, Rorty advises that we cheerfully embrace our lucky political inheritance, which we only risk squandering by interrogating too closely.

It would be nice if it were all that easy. But one of Nietzsche's major claims was, after all, that some of us will always rebel against the leveling effect of liberal democracy, while others—most of us—will join the herd. Likewise, Nietzsche thought that the truth was rarely ever useful. He thought errors, disasters and profound misunderstandings were much more precious.

Still, there is something to be said for the happy ending America has given Nietzsche. A country that can translate the striving of the Nietzschean superman into a guide for democracy's self-creating everyman may have discovered a rare kind of philosophical agility. The shift may not be quite fair to Nietzsche, but then he was always thrilled by America's powerful misreading of the European past.

—Mr. Meaney is a doctoral student in history at Columbia and a co-editor of the Utopian.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Public Diplomacy and Advocacy: Dr. Elliott and His Blog

2011-12-16T11:29:00.000-08:00

Dr. Kim Andrew Elliott, in his splendid and must-read blog, fails to mention (so far as I can tell) items posted about the Broadcasting Board of Governors by BBG Watch, critical reports about USG International Broadcasting which I, personally, sometimes disagree with, despite their passionate and humane analyses. But such critical comments must be heard for the good of the Republic.

I hope that, even if such no-news-exclusion is in fact not the case in his exceptional blog, the admirable Dr. Elliott, who prizes journalistic objectivity and a firewall between "news" and "advocacy" (advocacy -- public diplomacy as he sees it), it (his blog) will continue to be true to his intelligence rather than to his getting a USG check to post (or more accurately said, not post) pertinent matters as regards US International Broadcasting.

An Exchange on "Listening" in Public Diplomacy

2011-12-15T20:01:00.000-08:00

An email exchange (posted here with the kind permission of Professor Albro*) regarding the Professor's article, Dilemmas of a Dyslexic Public Diplomacy:

Hi Rob [Professor Albro], Thank you for your important piece. Will cite with pleasure in today's Public Diplomacy Review. Meanwhile, you might find this minor observation on my "Notes and Essays" blog pertaining to your scholarly article amusing; my parti pris, I assure you, in no way denigrates the importance of listening in public diplomacy, but suggests that US public diplomats "in the field" are not the only ones guilty of the sin of paying no attention to what others are saying -- indeed, these diplomats' audiences/interlocutors can at times be blamed for this transgression as well.

I base the above unscientific generalization on my twenty-year US diplomatic experience (mostly in Eastern/Central Europe/the Balkans, 1981-2002), where programs/events organized (e.g., by the US Embassy) to create a truthful dialogue (I include one-on-one meetings such as a luncheon) are sometimes seen by local audiences/luminaries as an opportunity to engage (on their part) in an endless monologue.

Indeed, at the risk of exaggerating and being overly ironic, I would suggest that, in some foreign countries, it's really not expected, on occasions supposedly organized to be exchanges of ideas and opinions, for a US diplomat to utter a word in the local language or in English. Her local interlocutors, essentially, don't really want her to open her mouth at all (except, at restaurants, constantly to swallow food, a sure way to keep "the US official" quiet), but rather for her to attentively be awed by what they -- the host country pundits -- have to pontificate about.

I'm somewhat ashamed to admit this, but I found such conversational passivity expected of a diplomat from some important Embassy contacts professionally less challenging than trying, tactfully and forcefully, to make a point, especially a positive one, about the United States. Saying nothing and just listening (or, quite honestly, in all-too-many cases, just pretending to listen, especially when your interlocutor goes on and on and on, incessantly), is a safe, carefree way to carry out public diplomacy (no one can quote you in the press; and how can you offend anyone when you say nothing?).

As a professional diplomat ("no comment'), silence (sorry, I meant "listening") you know won't get into trouble with bureaucracies in Washington or the host country, even (especially?) in today's interconnected social-media world, by putatively "listening" -- i.e. "saying nothing."

More seriously, though, it seems to me artificial to create a dichtomony between listening and speaking. You don't really listen if you don't speak, and you don't really speak if you don't listen.

And, most important, the best part of any Foreign Service career (I would say) is sharing ideas, in intelligent give-and-take conversations, with distinguished persons (who cares about their social/economic/academic status) overseas, particularly young and upcoming ones, at a not-too-solemn social occasion that leads to further discussion -- and not just online. But such opportunities are certainly not automatic, especially when dealing with officials.

In the case of listening, nobody's perfect -- Americans or the rest of the world.

Best, John

P.S. Again, based on my overseas experience, a rather rare -- and laudatory -- American phenomenon, certainly not a univeral one, is that in the U.S. speakers/teachers will often ask their audience/students, "Do you have any questions?" thereby suggesting they are eager to "listen" to what those supposedly listening to them have to say. Overseas, and I would include Great Britain in this category based on my service in London (granted, in the early 80s of the oh-so-distant past century); the notion of a speaker, in the sea-walled island, asking for the opinions of his listeners is not always the rule.

Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:23:02 -0600
From: robert.albro@verizon.net
To: johnhbrown30@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: RE: Cultural Diplomacy and Listening

Hi John -- Many thanks for this! I very much appreciate your notes from the field about listening -- especially their wry delivery -- and I feel your pain! As an anthropologist who spends time doing ethnographic fieldwork -- long days spent listening to others digress -- and trying to facilitate often challenging conversations among policy stakeholders with often sharply diverging perspectives, I can only sympathize.

It's true: listening is not in itself going to get anything done. And others are just as capable of monologue -- strategically so. It's fair to say, with my take on listening, this is as much a kind of cultural critique of ourselves as a direct plea, if you will. So, programmatically we could do more to listen. But, I'm really talking about "listening" as an opportunity to more firmly situate the practice of diplomacy -- as a dialogue with others -- within its negotiated (in the spirit of dialogue) social, political, cultural/interpretive -- and linguistic -- contexts of meaning not only for "us" but also for "them."

I very much appreciate your take on this.

Best,

Rob

Robert Albro
International Communication
School of International Service
American University

Image from

----

*The below is an edited, expanded version of the 12/15/11 email from JB to Professor Albro regarding his article; the professor did not see this expanded version in its final form, but ok'd its being posted without his reviewing it.]

The Soft Power of Online Diplomacy (pertains to South Korea's Public Diplomacy)

2011-12-14T05:27:00.000-08:00

The Soft Power of Online Diplomacy - Greg Boone, Harms-Boone Productions. Worth reading1

Collaborative power: The case for Sweden

2011-12-13T07:12:00.000-08:00

Collaborative power: The case for Sweden - Stefan Geens, dliberation.org. Worth reading!

Among the great American contributions to civilization

2011-12-11T15:21:00.000-08:00

As I realize, now in my near-middle 60s, that I am no longer going through puberty (thank God America still is), I have aspirations to write a "definitive" history of dentistry, with a focus on the USA. Compare teeth-hygiene in our "homeland" with that of other countries (including the notoriously-bad-teeth UK, from whom we thankfully separated in 1776)

and you see a wonderfully concrete sign of human progress. Dental floss: Among the great American contribution to civilization. God Bless America. Image from

Betting 10 thousand bucks -- A footnote to the Romney comment during the latest Republican presidential debate.

2011-12-11T12:10:00.000-08:00

Re: Mitt Romney challenges Rick Perry to $10,000 bet in GOP debate, the below footnote could be of interest:

The Old Mormon Birthplace of Las Vegas, Nevada

(Photo of the Old Mormon Fort, Las Vegas, Nevada are courtesy of Linda Miller)

The company paraded at the dawn of day and fired a salute very spiritedly; also at sun-up and again when the liberty pole was erected and the flag floated majestically to the breeze, another salute was fired the company having previously assembled, kneeling down and offering up their devotions to God. Afterwards there were many spirited speeches, songs, and toasts from many of the brethren. Then all were dismissed by prayer and went to perform our several camps duties.¹

John Steele, one of the first of the Mormon Missionaries to arrive at what became the "Las Vegas Mission," wrote the above in his journal to recount the activities of the first Independence Day celebrations in 1855. The group arrived from Salt Lake less than three weeks before on June 14, after being called by President Brigham Young to establish this mission to convert the nomadic Southern Paiute Indians to Mormonism and teach them new farming techniques. On the Old Spanish Trail between New Mexico and California, the Las Vegas Valley was an oasis in the desert. The Mormons wanted to establish a halfway station in the valley for travelers between Salt Lake City and the

Pacific Coast. The area was particularly coveted for Mormon territorial expansion because it was located halfway between the Mormon settlements of Southern Utah and the San Bernardino Mission established in 1851 in Southern California.

After the mission closed, the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort served as a ranch, resort, and cement testing facility. Today, a small portion of the original fort wall, part of the bastion, the underground foundation of the ranch, and remnants of the testing lab, remain to tell the story of the origins of Las Vegas.

On June 11, 2005 the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort came alive again as re-enactors (many descendants of the original Utah Pioneers) brought Old Glory out at the fort yard as they had done 150 years before. Ranch owner, Helen Stewart, was seen on the grounds. Civil War re-enactors recalled the war's importance to Nevada's history. Lunch was served by the pioneers in Dutch ovens like they used in the past. All of this was done to honor the memory of the many faces that contributed to the history of the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort, and promote its legacy in hopes of preserving it for future generations.

¹ Excerpted from John Steele's diary reprinted in The Fortress, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Las Vegas, Nevada: Friends of the Fort, 2000); also cited in Our Pioneer Heritage.

Drones and Veils

2011-12-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it has occurred to more persons than I that the putative CIA drone that flew over Iran seems inspired, in its design, by veiled Muslims?

--Image from Iran Uses Captured Drone To Play The Victim Card, Adam Rawnsley, Wired

Image from

SEE ALSO

BBC propaganda: warning: hilarious - As'ad AbuKhalil, angryarab.blogspot.com: The BBC Arabic has a report on the US drone plane downed by Iran. That is not the story. Look at the picture accompanying the story, as if this compares to the super secret drone downed by Iran.

(thanks A.) Image from article

See also: The Game of Drones

What we mean by a liberal education

2011-12-09T18:22:00.000-08:00

"Like the Catholic Church on the eve of the Reformation, the university sector in the United States is a vast, ramshackle social formation embracing the clever and the stupid, the idealist and the cynic, the vocationally driven and the idle drone. ... The thought that the provision of non-degrees by non-universities might be the modern equivalent of the sale of indulgences has major consequences for what we mean by a liberal education."

--Jonathan Clark, The Times Literary Supplement (December 2, 2011), p. 9

Sex, Lies (Propaganda?) and Video Tapes -- Veena Malik and Public Diplomacy

2011-12-04T12:12:00.000-08:00

Always, as I am, interested in propaganda and its relation -- if any -- to public diplomacy, I recently posted, on recent editions of the Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review (PDPBR), the below entries pertaining to Ms. Malik based on my perusal of media items on the internet falling under the Google category of "propaganda."

Since the posting of these entries on the PDPBR starting December 2, the number of visits to the website has (according to Google Analytics) increased more than fivefold (I am writing this on Sunday, December 4, at 3:00 pm, not excluding the possibility that Google Analytics accidentally replicated beserk stock market computers). Most of the "clicks" are coming from Pakistan and India -- but a larger number than usual from a number of other countries as well. No other items I have cited in the PDPBR -- during the several years I have compiled it -- have created such excitement.

Evidently the Ms. Malik "exposure" has touched a nerve in certain parts of the world, although it is not out of the question, may I again note, that responses to the blog were automatically generated (but if they were, I would have expected -- perhaps erroneously -- negative comments on this subject in the PDPBR, none of which have appeared to date). If readers of this "Notes and Essays" (NEA) can provide its compiler, as regards in the aforementioned countries (about which he regrettably knows little), in-depth explanations for this phenomenon in the below comments section, I (and doubtless some NEA readers as well) would be grateful. Perhaps, at some point in the future, these comments would be useful to a scholar writing a "case study" about cultural factors influencing world public opinion.

December 4 PDPBR

Veena Malik full Story Indian and Malik's propaganda - epakistantimes.blogspot.com: Veena Malik who posed in the nude for an Indian magazine with the initials of Pakistan's intelligence agency on her arm has triggered fury across the nation. Veena Malik's photo on the website of FHM India, in advance of its publication in the magazine's December issue, has been lighting up social network website Facebook and Twitter

since earlier this week. Malik has broken Pakistani religious and national taboos in the past. She is a target for conservative and a heroine to some Pakistani liberals. Maulana Abdul Qawi declared on Aaj TV on Saturday that her latest venture into controversy was a "shame for all Muslims." Farzana Naz, interviewed by the same channel on the streets of Lahore, said that the actress had "bowed all us women in shame." Image from. See also John Brown, "Public Diplomacy Goes 'Pubic,'" (2007) CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy, which discusses an article, Ben Harrris, "Sexy photos from Israel spark debate" (2007), JTA, with the caption: The Israeli Consulate's invitation to a party for the July issue of Maxim has sparked outrage among feminists and female parliamentarians.

December 3 PDPBR

Veena Malik FHM Mag[a]zine Scandle, Veena Malik Nude Pictures, Videos for FHM Mag[a] zine - Veena Malik Nude Photo

Scandal And Anti Pakistani ISI Propaganda in Indian Media for FHM Magazine. Image from entry

December 2 PDPBR

Veena Malik Nude Photo Scandal And Anti Pakistani ISI Propaganda in Indian Media for FHM Magazine - najamsethiaapaskibaat.wordpress.com:

Image from entry (entry has no text)

Knowledge in the Internet Age

2011-12-02T03:55:00.000-08:00

"We have for a couple of millenia in the West throught of knowledge as a system of settled, consistent truths. Perhaps that exhibits the limitations of knowledge's medium more than of knowledge itself: when knowledge is communicated and preserved by writing it in permanent ink on papers, it becomes that which makes it through institutional filters and that which does not change. Yet knowledge's new medium is not a publishing system so much as a networked public. We may get lots of knowledge out of our data commons, but the knowledge is more likely to be a continuous argument as it is tugged this way and that. Indeed, that is the face of knowledge in the age of the Net: never fully settled, never fully written, never entirely done."

--David Weinberger, "The Machine That Would Predict the Future," Scientific American (December 2011), p. 57

Stating the Obvious -- or, a "New Theory for ... Foreign Policy"

2011-12-01T05:31:00.000-08:00

"Collaborative power ... [is] the power of many to do together what no one can do alone. ... Remember, drop by drop, water will wear away or wash away stone."
-- Anne-Marie Slaughter, "A New Theory for the Foreign Policy Frontier: Collaborative Power," theatlantic.com; image from

For historians/academics interested in Public Diplomacy (a growing "intellectual" cottage industry): Mr. Clean

2011-11-29T22:54:00.000-08:00

True story, recollected as best he can by memory-challenged ex-PD (public diplomacy) Foreign Service officer John Brown

Place: US State Department Human Resources

Time: Early 2000's

Persons Involved: No-Smiles Human Resources officer (NSHRO), sitting behind her desk in an office at Foggy Bottom; returning from overseas posting Public Diplomacy Foreign Service officer J. Brown (PDFSOJB)

NSHRO: So you are looking for a job now that you're back from Russia.

PDFSOJB: Yes, Madam.

(Moment of solemn silence. NSHRO prints out document.)

NSHRO (Looks at paper; then slowly raises eyes to PDFSOJB): You look pretty clean.

PDFSOJB: Thank you, madam.

NSHRO: In over twenty years [of service], all your postings abroad except one have been hardship posts. Not bad.

PDSOJB: Yes, madam. Thank you.

NSHRO: Only one and half years in Washington during that time -- not bad.

PDSOJB: Thank you, madam.

NSHRO: Yes, you look pretty clean.

PDSOJB: Thank you, madam. But why pretty [emphasis] clean?

NSHRO: But you are PD, aren't you?

Image from; see also John Brown, "Getting the People Part Right: A Report on the Human Resources Dimension of U.S. Public Diplomacy" (American Diplomacy, July 22, 2008)

Is This George Kennan?

2011-11-27T03:16:00.000-08:00

Is This George Kennan?

New York Review of Books, December 8, 2011
Frank Costigliola. Review of George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis
Penguin, 784 pp., $39.95

It seemed like the perfect match. In the late 1970s John Lewis Gaddis was smart, sympathetic, and eager to write the biography. George F. Kennan admired Gaddis as probably “the best of the younger historians of American policy in the immediate postwar period.”1 Kennan had earned enormous respect over his long career as a diplomat, historian, public intellectual, and critic of US policy in the cold war. Yet he remained thin-skinned about any disparagement. Anxious to have his voice heard by future generations, Kennan worried that “weak and superficial”—and wrongheaded—biographies would garble his message and life story.2

The intellectual turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s amplified that concern. Some younger historians, spurred by their abhorrence of the Vietnam War and by the analyses of William A. Williams and others on the New Left, were critical of the foreign policy establishment, Kennan included, even though he had spoken out eloquently against the conflict in Southeast Asia. Kennan’s American Diplomacy, which had won widespread praise after its publication in 1951, was now being dismissed as “obscurantist and misleading,” a reviewer in these pages reported in August 1968.3

Gaddis, in contrast, praised the wisdom and necessity of Kennan’s famous doctrine arguing that the right approach to the USSR was “containment,” not aggressive military action. Kennan had articulated these ideas in his so-called Long Telegram of 1946 from the US embassy in Moscow, and his “Mr. X” article of 1947 in Foreign Affairs, and while director of the State Department’s policy planning staff from 1947 to 1949. Gaddis’s widely read Strategies of Containment praised Kennan as the brilliant “grand strategist” of the late 1940s who had astutely assessed problems and had recommended the right mix of policies to deal with them. In 1977, Foreign Affairs published a retrospective essay by Gaddis lauding Kennan’s foresight, consistency, and caution regarding the use of US military force.

When two younger historians, citing recently declassified documents, charged in 1978 that the containment doctrine was dangerously vague, and that Kennan in 1948–1949 had in fact recommended military intervention to deal with political crises in Italy and Taiwan, Gaddis publicly mocked them for puffing up such “curiosities.”4 Kennan appreciated this defense. He confided to Gaddis that he was appalled at the inability of many of our scholars to look carefully at the wording of official documents and to put them into the [proper] context…. [While] I have no desire to enter in a polemic with [those] whose opinion I do not greatly value, I do, however, value your own opinion.5

In the fall of 1981, Gaddis put to Kennan, who would soon turn seventy-eight, the possibility of his writing an authorized biography to be published posthumously. He asked for exclusive access to the Kennan diaries, letters, and other papers still closed to other scholars, and he wanted to be able to talk to Kennan about the past. Kennan accepted eagerly: “I can think of no one who…would be better qualified than yourself.” He added, “I value your contribution especially, because so much nonsense has been talked about ‘containment.’”6

There soon surfaced, however, hints of a disagreement that would cause the older man some anguish. Though Gaddis lauded Kennan’s “grand strategy” between 1946 and 1948 to contain the Soviet Union, he remained largely unsympathetic to Kennan’s efforts in the subsequent forty years to propose a changed relationship with the Soviets that would lead through negotiations to an easing of the cold war. Kennan tried to explain this position to Gaddis repeatedly. He had always regarded “successful containment not as an end in itself but as the prerequisite for the ultimate process of negotiation.” Since 1948, he had viewed the division of Europe into Soviet and American spheres as a dangerous “geopolitical anomaly.” The creation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the armies eyeballing each other across the West German–East German frontier, and the deadly weapons on hair-trigger alert—all this disturbed Kennan, who increasingly feared nuclear war.

He lamented his failure, particularly between 1948 and 1958, to convince Washington and its allies in Western Europe to trade their “‘positions of strength’” for a Soviet pullback from Eastern Europe, nuclear reductions, and a reknitting of divided Germany and Europe.7 Kennan never claimed that such negotiations would succeed. Rather he insisted, and in numerous articles and speeches pleaded, that the horrors of nuclear war made it foolhardy not to try. Gaddis, who regarded the cold war as a secure “long peace” and who edged to a more conventional hard-line view from the 1970s on, shared neither Kennan’s concerns nor his analysis. Though their relations remained cordial, Kennan’s letters and diaries show that the aging man was bothered by their differences. It would have been understandable if this disagreement caused some delay in Gaddis’s completion of his masterwork.

By 2000, Kennan, now ninety-six years old, despaired in his diary that Gaddis “had no idea of what was really at stake” in the “long battle I was waging…against the almost total militarization of Western policy towards Russia.” Looking back at the nuclear holocaust narrowly averted during the Cuban missile episode and the Berlin crisis of 1958 to 1961, and at the costly proxy wars waged in Vietnam and elsewhere, he believed that “had my efforts been successful,” they “could have obviated the vast expenses, dangers, and distortions of outlook of the ensuing Cold War.” Then, perhaps thinking of the time and faith invested in his chronicler, Kennan lamented:

That this battle should not be apparent even to the most serious of my postmortem biographers means that the most significant of the efforts of the first half of my career—namely, to bring about a reasonable settlement of the European problems of the immediate postwar period—will never find their historian or their understanding. And this is hard.8

Kennan, then approaching the end of his 101-year life, judged “the most significant effort” of his career not his helping to formulate the policies to contain the Soviet Union, but rather his subsequent push for Washington to establish workable relations with Moscow. He had, after all, predicted in his “Mr. X” article that Soviet communism would come to an end, and he had been proved right.

Despite its problems of perspective and balance, Gaddis’s George F. Kennan remains a monumental and absorbing book. His prose is elegant and lively. Though Kennan will likely attract other biographers, none will be able to match the research on display here. Not only has Gaddis pored through Kennan’s 20,000-page diary, a separate “dream diary” of reflections, and the 300-plus boxes of other papers by Kennan now open for research at Princeton, but he also conducted many interviews with the former diplomat and his associates. Most of those people are now gone. Gaddis had privileged access to family papers still in the possession of Kennan’s daughter. The cordial correspondence and discussions between “George” and “John” fill three manuscript boxes. Gaddis did extensive work in other US archives. There are some British and even a few Russian documents. He is often perceptive, sensitive, and reflective. And he is justifiably proud that George and his wife, Annelise, became for two decades “my companions.”

Gaddis’s political predilections—as evidenced by his enthusiasm for Kennan as cold warrior in 1946–1948 and his skepticism about Kennan as peacemaker in later years—shape this biography. He sides largely with Kennan’s critics, such as former secretary of state Dean Acheson, in the heated debate over Kennan’s advocacy in 1957–1958 for US “disengagement” from the cold war in Europe. Indeed, while quoting extensively from Acheson’s venomous assault on Kennan in Foreign Affairs, Gaddis merely notes but does not quote Kennan’s rebuttal in the same journal.

In 1966–1968, Kennan articulated a set of cogent and prescient ideas and policies in response to the Vietnam War and other changes around the world. The former cold warrior had an important part in making opposition to the Vietnam War respectable. The biography, however, devotes only one paragraph to recounting the substance of Kennan’s testimony in February 1966 before Senator J. William Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee. Kennan’s strong testimony in January 1967 on the futility of the war, at a time when it had become a bitter national issue, goes unmentioned. Nor, curiously, does the book even mention Kennan’s early and influential endorsement of Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries on grounds of McCarthy’s opposition to the war.

The biography suffers from this neglect. In the heated cross fire of the Senate hearings, Kennan outlined long-range principles grounded in history. He laid out a strategy that if not grand was certainly wise: scrutinizing old ideas and knee-jerk attitudes, insisting that the nation’s goals match resources, and guarding against both overinvolvement and timidity. He argued that much of China’s fierce rhetoric stemmed from that nation’s past humiliation by the West. “A new generation of Chinese leaders” would likely improve relations, he believed. He was also prescient in warning, a year before the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring, that such an uprising would induce the Soviets to march, just as “the Tsar’s government would have moved in.”9

As in the 1950s, Kennan worried about the military standoff along the border of the two Germanies. For him, serious danger lay not in far-off Vietnam but rather in the nuclear arms race. Washington’s primary challenge was in “the real possibilities for a genuine…exciting and constructive…understanding eventually between the Russian people and our people.” This lifelong lover of Russian culture remarked, “If I did not believe this was a possibility I wouldn’t have led the life I have for the last forty years.”10

Regarding Vietnam, where escalation was yielding only stalemate, Kennan urged securing enclaves in the south, halting military offensives and bombing, and inviting negotiations. He wanted a US withdrawal but not a precipitous and humiliating exit. As millions watched on television, Kennan argued before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Americans should neither forget that “we are a great nation” able to endure the loss of South Vietnam nor delude ourselves with “illusions about invincibility.” Americans were vulnerable to manipulation. “Practically everybody who wants our aid in the world claims that he wants it in the cause of freedom.” No matter the military arguments, “the spectacle of Americans” attacking “a poor and helpless people, and particularly a people of different race and color,” wreaked “psychological damage” to America’s global image. He stressed “that there is more respect to be won…by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”11

Citing Woodrow Wilson’s futile promotion of elections in Russia in 1918–1919, Kennan argued that such empty rituals could not stabilize South Vietnam. In general, “it is very, very difficult for outsiders to come into a situation”—any foreign situation—”and to do good.” Moreover, “by our interference” in peripheral matters, “we raise questions of prestige which need not have been raised.” Far better to “bring our influence to bear…through the power of the example of our own civilization here at home.” He summed up his testimony by quoting John Quincy Adams’s famous speech of July 4, 1821: “While America stood as ‘the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,’ she should be ‘the champion and vindicator only of her own.’”12

This carefully argued position does not get adequate attention in Gaddis’s account. Nor, as has been said, does he recount how on February 29, 1968—between the beginning of the Tet Offensive on January 31 and the New Hampshire primary on March 12—Kennan, the originator of the containment doctrine supposedly justifying the Vietnam War, addressed a crowd in Newark, New Jersey. He attacked the war as a “grievously unsound” venture that had invested huge resources in a “single secondary theater of world events.” Escalation threatened nuclear conflict with China or Russia. The gravity of the situation approached “the first months of 1942.” The war was alienating America’s youth and much of the world. Kennan scorned the Johnson administration for forgetting that a country such as ours owed “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” His talk amounted to a devastating critique of the administration’s “grand strategy.”

Kennan finished with a strong endorsement of Eugene McCarthy, who deserved “our admiration, our sympathy, and our support.”13 At first McCarthy’s campaign had seemed a quixotic gesture, notable only for the enthusiasm of its young supporters. That Kennan came out for McCarthy—whose surprisingly high vote in the New Hampshire primary helped persuade Johnson not to run—was a remarkable moment in American political history, and it is hard to understand why Gaddis ignores it.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, with the nuclear arms race seemingly unstoppable, Kennan grew almost frantic about an imminent holocaust. “The only thing I have left in life,” he told Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “is to do everything I can to stop the war.” Appalled at President Ronald Reagan’s ramped-up arms spending and rhetoric about the “evil empire,” Kennan denounced the administration as “ignorant, unintelligent, complacent and arrogant; worse still is the fact that it is frivolous and reckless.” Even after Reagan reversed course and began serious arms reduction negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, Kennan remained skeptical about the President. Gaddis, for his part, admires Reagan as being “like Franklin D. Roosevelt…an instinctive grand strategist” and finds that Kennan’s “attitude bordered on the outrageous.” Yet at the time, many highly qualified scientists used just such words about Reagan’s insistence on pursuing an impracticable and immensely expensive system of “Star Wars.”

In 1981, when he made his agreement with Gaddis, Kennan wrote that while he thought Gaddis the most qualified historian “so far as the political-intellectual part of the biography is concerned,” he was unsure about Gaddis’s understanding of his personal life. Gaddis responded, rightly, that the personal sphere could not be separated from the political one.14 That Kennan struggled to control his emotions was obvious not only to his biographer but also to other close observers. The Russian expert Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen, who had known Kennan since the early 1930s, remarked that his friend could not always “divorce his visceral feelings from his knowledge of facts.” Another colleague saw him as emotionally fragile: “It was difficult for him to take unpleasant things.” Isaiah Berlin, who was with him in Moscow in 1945, recalled that Kennan “was terribly absorbed—personally involved, somehow—in the terrible nature of the [Stalin] regime.”

Kennan himself “stressed the importance of the psychological dimension” in his life.15 He told Gaddis that “the inner emotional life of any person, as Freud discovered, is a dreadful chaos. We all have vestiges of our animalistic existence in us.” Consequently, “good form,” whether it involved the ceremonies of diplomacy or the constraints of marriage, “is really the thing to live for.” He continued, “‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.’ My God, I’ve coveted ten thousand of them in the course of my life, and will continue to do so into the eighties.” “All that has to be fought with. But the main thing is to try to play your role in a decent way.”16

Gaddis deals with the political implications of Kennan’s personal character in a bifurcated way. By characterizing Kennan as the cool Clausewitzian in 1946–1947, he plays down the sense of frustration that Kennan experienced in Russia—an emotional state that was reflected in his advocacy of containment and helped make the language of the Long Telegram and the “Mr. X” article so eloquent and persuasive. Quite different is the way that Gaddis emphasizes the emotional concerns with war that supposedly marred Kennan’s strategic thinking in the mid-1950s, when he sought negotiations to head off a nuclear confrontation in Europe, and again in the 1970s–1980s, when he sounded the alarm against the feverish nuclear arms race.

Though he captures much of the man’s complexity, Gaddis’s depiction of Kennan is ultimately clipped and flattened. Perhaps the problem is trying to frame within “an American life,” as the subtitle has it, the biography of someone who mused that even his friends did “not know the depth of my estrangement, the depth of my repudiation of the things [the American public] lives by.”17 As compared to the portrait in the biography, the personality revealed in Kennan’s diaries and letters—even the figure who emerges from the transcripts of Gaddis’s interviews—was more irreverent as a collegian, more deeply identified with Russian culture as a fledgling diplomat, more ambivalent about his marriage, more alienated from American life, more inclined to concealment, and more tortured by the limitations of old age. The Kennan of the letters and diaries is far less conventional and more complex and elusive than the person we encounter in Gaddis’s biography.

In his conclusion, Gaddis characterizes Kennan as a teacher, a word that Kennan himself used and that is certainly apt. But Kennan also said he was “a prophet. It was for this that I was born.” Gaddis makes little of this self-description. Prophets are more intense and more given to jeremiads than academic teachers. Kennan, perhaps worrying about Gaddis’s suitability for depicting his character, remarked to him: “People who are a little unusual—the Boheme—they understand me, better than do the regular ones.”18

Distinctly non-Bohemian, it seems fair to say, were both Gaddis and the late Annelise Sørensen Kennan, to whom the biography is dedicated. The author acknowledges that “Annelise had her way with this book.” She urged him to write about the personal as well as the professional side of her husband and to include his lighter moments. She stressed, and Kennan himself acknowledged, that he tended to write in his diary when he was feeling morose, and rarely when he was not. Annelise was by all accounts a strong-minded spouse. They were close and their marriage lasted seventy-three years. Nevertheless, Kennan once “went out of his way to say that she is not a particularly ‘intellectual’ woman.”19 Nor did she always empathize with her husband’s moods and worries. Perhaps as a consequence, he sometimes did not confide in her. When Gaddis asked Annelise what she remembered about the unhappiness with US policy that had spurred Kennan to write the Long Telegram, Annelise reflected. “I don’t know whether I took [the discontent] so entirely seriously…. I don’t think I was aware that he was so frustrated.”20

Kennan turned to other women for solace and to meet other needs. He had, as Gaddis tells us, a series of affairs, flirtations, and fantasies. He wrote sections of the diary, including some entries about other women, in Russian—at one point reminding himself that he had to perfect the art of hiding from his wife nothing but the big things. Annelise held her husband “down to earth.” As Gaddis puts it, she pulled him “to the center.”21

He does the same in this book. Such emphasis on the conventional misses some idiosyncrasies that were important to Kennan’s thinking. The older man once described to Gaddis his habit, going back to childhood, of picking up on seemingly disassociated sights, sounds, and other stimuli and then bringing them together with other elements in his experience to fashion a concept or a connection uniquely his own. Throughout his life he had “read all sorts of mystery and beauty and other things into landscapes and places, and also into music.” He sensed what most other people could not. “Every city that I went to had not only a different atmosphere but a different sort of music and intonation to it…. I was immensely sensitive and responsive to differences in the atmosphere of places.”

In his seventies, Kennan tried to describe this almost painful acuteness. Visiting Stockholm, “something in the light, the sunlight, the late Northern evening suddenly made me aware of…Latvia and Estonia,” not so far away, “and I suddenly was absolutely filled with a sort of nostalgia for…the inner beauty and meaning of that flat Baltic landscape and the waters around it. It meant an enormous amount to me.” He then added, “You can’t explain these things.”22 Gaddis, perhaps understandably, did not try; such reflections do not appear in the biography.

Nonetheless, Kennan’s disclosure helps elucidate a central element of his political thinking: his intuitive yet often incisive and empathic descriptions of the inner worlds of the Russian people and of the Soviet regime—based both on his encyclopedic knowledge about Russia and his imaginative guesswork. To Kennan’s continuing frustration, the isolation of diplomats mandated by Kremlin policy made it impossible to talk intimately with top Soviet officials or most ordinary Russians. Kennan compensated by a mode of thought analogous to his sensing and feeling “the inner beauty and meaning” of the Baltic. Gaddis cites a revealing observation of Kennan by the China expert John Paton Davies:

It was a delight to watch him probe some sphinxlike announcement in Pravda for what might lie within or behind it, recalling some obscure incident in Bolshevik history or a personality conflict within the Party, quoting a passage from Dostoevsky on Russian character, or citing a parallel in Tsarist foreign policy. His subtle intellect swept the range of possibilities like a radar attuned to the unseen.

Kennan was attuned to the seen and the unseen. He would tell audiences, “I can assure you” about some aspect of Soviet belief for which he could have little evidence.23 Kennan’s elegant expression and unparalleled expertise gave him enormous authority, especially when he was warning about the Soviet menace in 1946 and 1947. He was far less influential as the cold war hardened, but still could not be ignored when he argued that it was not necessary to accept appeasement or war as alternatives.

In the fall of 2002, as the Bush administration was gearing up for war against Iraq, Kennan, then ninety-eight, spoke with reporters for the last time. He was in the Washington home of his old ally, former Senator Eugene McCarthy. Castigating the administration’s policy of preemptive war and its intention to oust Saddam Hussein, he warned that “the history of American diplomacy” demonstrated that “war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions.”24 He appeared sharp and articulate as he sketched out a strategy for the twenty-first century. Playing down the drama and the wisdom of Kennan’s last public statement, Gaddis mentions this incident in only three terse lines. He would have been fairer to his subject if he had taken more account of the view Kennan expressed in these pages in 1999:

This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable. If you think that our life here at home has meritorious aspects worthy of emulation by peoples elsewhere, the best way to recommend them is, as John Quincy Adams maintained, not by preaching at others but by the force of example. I could not agree more.

1 George F. Kennan to Michael J. Lacey, October 11, 1977, Box 15, George F. Kennan papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University. ↩
2 Kennan to Gaddis, April 3, 1984, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩
3 C. Vann Woodward, "Wild in the Stacks," The New York Review , August 1, 1968. ↩
4 Gaddis, "Kennan and Containment: A Reply," SHAFR Newsletter (1978), copy in Box 15, Kennan papers. The historians were John W. Coogan and Michael H. Hunt. ↩
5 Kennan to Gaddis, April 6, 1978, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩
6 Kennan to Gaddis, December 1, 1981, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩
7 See, for instance, Kennan to Gaddis, September 7, 1980, Box 15, Kennan papers. See also Kennan to Gaddis, September 28, 1986, ibid. ↩
8 Kennan diary, May 2, 2000, Box 239, Kennan papers. ↩
9 Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, 89th Congress, 2nd session, on S. 2793, February 10, 1966 [hereafter 1966 Senate Hearings], p. 371; Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, 90th Congress, 1st session, January 30, 1967 [hereafter 1967 Senate Hearings], p. 46. ↩
10 1967 Senate Hearings, p. 10. ↩
11 1966 Senate Hearings, pp. 338, 384, 334–335. ↩
12 1966 Senate Hearings, pp. 414, 381, 418, 336. ↩
13 Kennan, "Introducing Eugene McCarthy," The New York Review , April 11, 1968. ↩
14 Kennan to Gaddis, December 1, 1981; Gaddis to Kennan, December 14, 1981, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩
15 Dilworth, interview with Gaddis, December 6, 1987, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩
16 Kennan, interview with Gaddis, August 25, 1982. ↩
17 Kennan diary, October 21, 1955, Box 233, Kennan papers. ↩
18 Kennan, interview with Gaddis, December 13, 1987, Box 16, Kennan papers. ↩
19 Dilworth, interview with Gaddis, December 6, 1987, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩
20 Annelise Sorensen Kennan, interview with Gaddis, August 26, 1982, Box 16, Kennan papers. ↩
21 Dilworth, interview with Gaddis, December 6, 1987, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩
22 Kennan, interview with Gaddis, August 24, 1982, Box 16, Kennan papers. ↩
23 See, for instance, Kennan, "The Background of Current Russian Diplomatic Moves," December 10, 1946, in Measures Short of War , edited by Giles D. Harlow and George C. Maetz (National Defense University Press, 1991), p. 86. ↩
24 Albert Eisele, "George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq," The Hill , September 26, 2002. ↩

1.1
George F. Kennan to Michael J. Lacey, October 11, 1977, Box 15, George F. Kennan papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University. ↩

2.2
Kennan to Gaddis, April 3, 1984, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩

3.3
C. Vann Woodward, "Wild in the Stacks," The New York Review , August 1, 1968. ↩

4.4
Gaddis, "Kennan and Containment: A Reply," SHAFR Newsletter (1978), copy in Box 15, Kennan papers. The historians were John W. Coogan and Michael H. Hunt. ↩

5.5
Kennan to Gaddis, April 6, 1978, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩

6.6
Kennan to Gaddis, December 1, 1981, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩

7.7
See, for instance, Kennan to Gaddis, September 7, 1980, Box 15, Kennan papers. See also Kennan to Gaddis, September 28, 1986, ibid. ↩

8.8
Kennan diary, May 2, 2000, Box 239, Kennan papers. ↩

9.9
Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, 89th Congress, 2nd session, on S. 2793, February 10, 1966 [hereafter 1966 Senate Hearings], p. 371; Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, 90th Congress, 1st session, January 30, 1967 [hereafter 1967 Senate Hearings], p. 46. ↩

10.10
1967 Senate Hearings, p. 10. ↩

11.11
1966 Senate Hearings, pp. 338, 384, 334–335. ↩

12.12
1966 Senate Hearings, pp. 414, 381, 418, 336. ↩

13.13
Kennan, "Introducing Eugene McCarthy," The New York Review , April 11, 1968. ↩

14.14
Kennan to Gaddis, December 1, 1981; Gaddis to Kennan, December 14, 1981, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩

15.15
Dilworth, interview with Gaddis, December 6, 1987, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩

16.16
Kennan, interview with Gaddis, August 25, 1982. ↩

17.17
Kennan diary, October 21, 1955, Box 233, Kennan papers. ↩

18.18
Kennan, interview with Gaddis, December 13, 1987, Box 16, Kennan papers. ↩

19.19
Dilworth, interview with Gaddis, December 6, 1987, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩

20.20
Annelise Sorensen Kennan, interview with Gaddis, August 26, 1982, Box 16, Kennan papers. ↩

21.21
Dilworth, interview with Gaddis, December 6, 1987, Box 15, Kennan papers. ↩

22.22
Kennan, interview with Gaddis, August 24, 1982, Box 16, Kennan papers. ↩

23.23
See, for instance, Kennan, "The Background of Current Russian Diplomatic Moves," December 10, 1946, in Measures Short of War , edited by Giles D. Harlow and George C. Maetz (National Defense University Press, 1991), p. 86. ↩

24.24
Albert Eisele, "George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq," The Hill , September 26, 2002. ↩

An Excellent Article on "Leveraging Hip Hop in US Foreign Policy"/Public Diplomacy

2011-11-26T05:29:00.000-08:00

Leveraging Hip Hop in US Foreign Policy - Garrison, Anthro | Religion | Media: Musings on the intersection of religion, media, culture, and politics...with an emphasis on Islam/Muslims post-9/11.

In April 2010, the US State Department sent a rap group named Chen Lo and The Liberation Family to perform in Damascus, Syria.

Following Chen Lo's performance, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was asked by CBS News about US diplomacy's recent embrace of hip hop. "Hip hop is America," she said, noting that rap and other musical forms could help "rebuild the image" of the United States. "You know it may be a little bit hopeful, because I can't point to a change in Syrian policy because Chen Lo and the Liberation Family showed up. But I think we have to use every tool at our disposal."

The State Department began using hiphop as a tool in the mid-2000s, when, in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the resurgence of the Taliban, Karen Hughes, then undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, launched an initiative called Rhythm Road. The programme was modelled on the jazz diplomacy initiative of the Cold War era, except that in the "War on Terror", hip hop would play the central role of countering "poor perceptions" of the US.

In 2005, the State Department began sending "hip hop envoys" - rappers, dancers, DJs - to perform and speak in different parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The tours have since covered the broad arc of the Muslim world, with performances taking place in Senegal and Ivory Coast, across North Africa, the Levant and Middle East, and extending to Mongolia, Pakistan and Indonesia.

The artists stage performances and hold workshops; those hip hop ambassadors who are Muslims talk to local media about being Muslim in the US. The tours aim not only to exhibit the integration of American Muslims, but also, according to planners, to promote democracy and foster dissent.

"You have to bet at the end of the day, people will choose freedom over tyranny if they're given a choice," Clinton observed of the State Department's hip hop programme in Syria - stating that cultural diplomacy is a complex game of "multidimensional chess".

"Hip hop can be a chess piece?" asked the interviewer. "Absolutely!" responded the secretary of state.

Much has been said about the role of hip hop in the Arab revolts. French media described [fr] the Arab Spring as le printemps des rappeurs ["The spring of the rappers"]. Time Magazine named Tunisian rapper Hamada Ben Amor (aka El General) - a rapper who was arrested by Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali - as one of the "100 Most Influential People of 2011", ranking him higher than President Barack Obama.

Hip hop revolution

It is true that since protests began in Tunisia in December 2010, rap has provided a soundtrack to the North African revolts. As security forces rampaged in the streets, artists in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi were writing lyrics and cobbling together protest footage, beats and rhymes, which they then uploaded to proxy servers. These impromptu songs - such as El General's Rais Lebled - were then picked up and broadcast by Al Jazeera, and played at gatherings and solidarity marches in London, New York and Washington.

But the role of music should not be exaggerated: Hip hop did not cause the Arab revolts any more than Twitter or Facebook did. The cross-border spread of popular movements is not a new phenomenon in the Arab world - the uprisings of 1919, which engulfed Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, occurred long before the advent of the internet, social media or rap music.

And the countries in the region with the most vibrant hip hop scenes, Morocco and Algeria, have not seen revolts. Western journalists' focus on hip hop - like their fixation on Facebook and Twitter - seems partly because, in their eyes, a taste for hip hop among young Muslims is a sign of moderation, modernity, even "an embrace of the US".

What is absent from these discussions about rap and the breakdown of Arab authoritarianism is the role that states - in the region and beyond - have played in shaping and directing local hip hop cultures. From deposed Tunisian dictator Ben Ali's mobilisation of hip hop culture against Islamism to the embattled Syrian regime's current support of "pro-stability rappers", to the US government's growing use of hip hop in public diplomacy, counter-terrorism and democracy promotion, regimes are intervening to promote some sub-styles of hip hop, in an attempt to harness the genre towards various political objectives.

The jazz tours of the Cold War saw the US government sent integrated bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman to various parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East to counter Soviet propaganda about American racial practices, and to get people in other countries to identify with "the American way of life".

The choice of jazz was not simply due to its international appeal. As historian Penny Von Eschen writes in her pioneering book Satchmo Blows Up the World, in the 1950s, the State Department believed that African-American culture could convey "a sense of shared suffering, as well as the conviction that equality could be gained under the American political system" to people who had suffered European colonialism.

Similar thinking underpins the current "hip hop diplomacy" initiatives. The State Department planners who are calling for "the leveraging of hip hop" in US foreign policy emphasise "the importance of Islam to the roots of hip hop in America", and the "pain" and "struggle" that the music expresses.

A Brookings report authored by the programme's architects - titled "Mightier than the Sword: Arts and Culture in the US-Muslim World Relationship" (2008) - notes that hip hop began as "outsiders' protest" against the US system, and now resonates among marginalised Muslim youth worldwide. From the Parisian banlieues to Palestine to Kyrgyzstan, "hip hop reflects struggle against authority" and expresses a "pain" that transcends language barriers.

An ironic choice

Moreover, note the authors, hip hop's pioneers were inner-city Muslims who "carry on an African-American Muslim tradition of protest against authority, most powerfully represented by Malcolm X". The report concludes by calling for a "greater exploitation of this natural connector to the Muslim world".

The choice of hip hop is ironic: The very music blamed for a range of social ills at home - violence, misogyny, consumerism, academic underperformance - is being deployed abroad in the hopes of making the US safer and better-liked. European states have also been disptaching their Muslim hip hop artists to perform in Muslim-majority countries. Long before the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the British Council was organising hip hop workshops in Tripoli, and sponsoring Electric Steps, "Libya's only hip hop band", as a way to promote political reform in that country.

Rap is also being used in de-radicalisation and counter-terrorism initiatives. American and European terrorism experts have expressed concerns over "anti-American hip hop", accenting the radicalising influence of this genre. Others have advocated mobilising certain sub-genres of hip hop against what they call "jihadi cool".

Warning that Osama bin Laden's associate Abu Yahya al-Libi has made al-Qaeda look "cool", one terrorism expert recommends that the US respond "with one of America's coolest exports: hip hop", specifically with a "subgroup" thereof.

"Muslim hip hop is Muslim poetry set to drum beats," explains Jeffrey Halverson in an article titled Rap Is Da Bomb for Defeating Abu Yahya. "Add in the emotional parallels between the plight of African-Americans and, for example, impoverished Algerians living in ghettos outside of Paris or Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and the analogy becomes even clearer."

But it's unclear how "Muslim hip hop" will exert a moderating or democratising influence: Will a performance by an African-American Muslim group trigger a particular calming "effect", pushing young Muslim men away from extremist ideas? Nor is it clear what constitutes "Muslim hip hop": Does the fact that Busta Rhymes is a Sunni Muslim make his music "Islamic"?

Moreover, while references to Islam in hip hop are - as these public diplomacy experts note - legion, they are not necessarily political or flattering. In December 2002, Lil Kim appeared on the cover of OneWorld magazine wearing a burqa and a bikini, saying "F*** Afghanistan".

50 Cent's track "Ghetto Quran" is about dealing drugs and "snitchin'". Foxy Brown charmed some and infuriated others with her song "Hot Spot", saying, "MCs wanna eat me but it's Ramadan."

More disturbing was the video "Hard" released in late 2009 by the diva, Rihanna, in which she appears decked out in military garb, heavily armed and straddling a tank's gun turret in a Middle Eastern war setting. An Arabic tattoo beneath her bronze bra reads, "Freedom Through Christ"; on a wall is the Quranic verse: "We belong to God, and to Him we shall return" - recited to honour the dead, and not an uncommon wall inscription in war-torn Muslim societies.

The point is that not all Islam-alluding hip hop resonates with Muslim youth. Those hip hop stars - Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Rakim - who are beloved among Muslim youth are appreciated because they work their Muslim identity into their art and because they forthrightly criticise US foreign policy.

At the recent BET hip hop Awards, Lupe Fiasco performed his hit "Words I Never Said", with a Palestinian flag draped over his mic. ("Gaza Strip was getting burned; Obama didn't say sh**," he rapped.) But neither Lupe nor Mos are likely to be invited on a State Department tour.

For State Department officials, the hip hop initiatives in Muslim-majority states showcase the diversity and integration of post-civil rights America. The multi-hued hip hop acts sent overseas represent a post-racial or post-racist American dream, and exhibit the achievements of the civil rights movement, a uniquely American moment that others can learn from.

But it's unclear how persuasive this racialised imagery is. Muslims do not resent the US for its lack of diversity. Where perceptions are poor, it is because of foreign policy, as well as, increasingly, domestic policies that target Muslims.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the State Department's efforts to showcase the model integration of US Muslims, and to deploy the moral and symbolic capital of the civil rights movement, is that these tours - as with the jazz tours - are occurring against a backdrop of unfavourable (and racialised) media images of Quran burnings, anti-mosque rallies and anti-sharia campaigns, as one of the most alarming waves of nativism in recent US history surges northward.

US diplomacy's embrace of hip hop as a foreign policy tool has sparked a heated debate, among artists and aficionados worldwide, over the purpose of hip hop: whether hip hop is "protest music" or "party music"; whether it is the "soundtrack to the struggle" or to American unipolarity; and what it means now that states - not just corporations - have entered the hip hop game.

Hip hop activists have long been concerned about how to protect their music from corporate power, but now that the music is being used in diplomacy and counterterrorism, the conversation is shifting.

The immensely popular "underground" British rapper Lowkey (Kareem Denis) recently articulated the question on many minds: "Hip hop at its best has exposed power, challenged power, it hasn't served power. When the US government loves the same rappers you love, whose interests are those rappers serving?"

More on US Laos Rapper-Astronomer-Ambassador in Action: She's "on a high" Performing US Public Diplomacy

2011-11-24T11:22:00.000-08:00

“Jay-Z she is not, but when the U.S. ambassador to Laos [Karen Stewart, a.k.a. MC Karen] took the stage at a music festival in the Laotian capital of Vientiane the other day she decided to try a

medium not usually employed in diplomacy: She rapped. In Lao. ... The festival also included a graffiti art competition on the theme ‘fake drugs.’ ... Stewart described the experience ... [:] 'After my rap, I was kind of on a high.'”

--Kirit Radia, “US Ambassador, a.k.a. MC Karen, Raps in Lao,” ABC News [includes video on the ambassador, who is also an astronomer]. For more on this event, see.

On astronomers, here's, in a somewhat different context, Walt Whitman: "When I sitting heard the astronomer ... how soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."

A Foreign Service officer whom I hold in high regard evaluated MC Karen's performance as follows: "Reverse colonialism/ugly Americanism at its worst."

Image from, with caption: Here I [MC Karen] am signing a hat for my rap partner-in-crime, MC Loko.

Interview with US Diplomat Peter Van Buren: Wisdom for American Public Diplomacy

2011-11-22T21:33:00.000-08:00

EXCLUSIVE! JB e-mail interview with US diplomat Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (2011); a review of the book at; Van Burens' blog at

Why did you join the Foreign Service?

I started the process of joining the FS in the mid-1980's. Out of grad school I received a scholarship to spend two years in Japan. I learned Japanese and found living abroad more interesting than living in central Ohio, and wanted to stay. Even though that time was the “Japan boom,” when Japan was to be Number One and crush the US, companies wanted people who both spoke Japanese and had some sort of business degree. That closed that door, as my MA was in Education. I looked into the military but decided I was just not the martial type. I read about the Foreign Service, passed the test at the Consulate in Osaka and wandered into work as an Foreign Service officer. To be honest, I was not entirely sure what the job was all about, but I knew it would keep me abroad, and, selected into the Consular cone, it seemed like I'd be helping people.

Why did you elect to go to Iraq?

The first 15 years or so of my career were great, exactly what I had hoped for. I enjoyed Consular work, particularly helping American citizens. As I say in my book, We Meant Well, this was the benign side of the American Empire, the ability and willingness to help our own people anywhere in the world. I was pleased and amazed to know that our government cared enough about its own citizens that we'd extend help to the most broken-down drug dealer arrested in Outer Carjackistan pretty much same as we did when Bill Gates lost his passport in Tokyo once. We were probably more polite to Bill and we did keep the office open an hour late to accommodate him, but you get the idea.

Fast forward to 2009. A series of bad assignment choices had landed me in Washington, bored with my job and bored with life in America. At the same time, my oldest daughter had chosen an expensive private college and a few extra bucks were needed. The confluence of a bunch of State Department inside-baseball stuff-- hitting my five year limit on this domestic assignment, being a hardship post Fair Share candidate and looking unenthusiastically at my chances for entering the Senior Foreign Service-- all pointed in one direction. I joke it was the nexus of terrorism and tuition in the book. So, I volunteered for any PRT in Iraq or Afghanistan (Pakistan was not on the go-to list at that time). I'll admit a smidgen of sense of duty and a dollop of curiosity about the wars as well. I was certainly not a True Believer nor entirely happy about the danger and time away from my family, but had crossed those bridges with the Foreign Service ethic years before. Iraq/Afghan service was, in my mind, a lot like the rest of the Foreign Service life, only more so.

Why do you think the U.S. invaded Iraq? Was it a wise decision?

That said, personally I opposed the war in Iraq and believed it to be a really stupid decision by the US, a pointless waste of lives, money and American prestige. My concerns very much mirrored the list you John created when you resigned [1], albeit far less well-articulated. I never considered resignation; my head was still then very much in the space of “I do Consular work” about as far from “politics” as I could be in a Cabinet agency like the State Department. I always characterized my work as separate from what the POL and ECON sections upstairs at the Embassy did. While they were worried about US military bases in Japan, I was worried about individual passports. I was comfortable with that, seeing it as a positive thing, not a “I'm not as good as the real diplomats thing” that can plague some Consular officers.

This may have been why what I saw in Iraq so shocked me. I was very unused to the, well, disingenuous chatter that seems to me now in retrospect to characterize much of what the non-Consular parts of State do on a daily basis. I had this, perhaps naive, very practical conception of our work. Consular at its best is about real problem solving: mentally ill American Citizen in the lobby, what are you gonna do? Faced with someone shouting incoherently and undressing in your waiting area, there is no room for a carefully conceived statement of concern, cleared by 18 offices over a three week period. You actually have to do something. In this sense, I was really, really the wrong guy to send into Iraq.

If, as your book suggests, you were so disillusioned with (and during) your tour in Iraq, why did you stay on as you did? Did you consider leaving the Foreign Service while serving on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in that country?

Like the stages of grief, I went through each in turn in Iraq. My initial mindset was to just keep on doing at my PRT whatever was already in progress, slide through my generous home leaves and get through my year as easily as possible. That plan, like any in warfare, lasted only until first contact. Almost from day one, as I recount in my book, I encountered fraud, waste and, well, stupidity. It was obvious to anyone that what we were doing made no sense, spending crazy amounts of money on obviously unconnected, feel good projects without much guidance. Disbelief and then denial as my boss, his boss and eventually the DCM in Baghdad told me that that was pretty much what the PRT program was about, albeit in nice words. I then tried living with Denial, the idea that if so little was expected of me, I could deliver that-- striving for mediocrity and often achieving it. No one before me had seen this PRT thing as a practical problem to resolve but instead simply as a time-space to fill until one's tour was over and one could go on to a sunny favored assignment somewhere better.

Most State PRT people I met saw it that way, agreeing (very) privately it made no sense but stating (very) publicly that it was not our problem to solve, just our job to carry out. It was, I came to understand, the ultimate expression of the gray man philosophy that haunts State-- our job is to drone-like carry out orders. Thinking gets you into trouble, speaking about problems dooms your career as a “troublemaker.”

My motives for going to Iraq remained what they were, however impure. I still needed the money, still needed to reset my five year timer in Washington with another kid in high school and all that, so I stayed in Iraq. I briefly tried to influence the projects my PRT did (failed), tried to get on the team and happily sign off on things (failed), tried to convince my boss that what we were doing was not accomplishing anything for Iraq (failed) and by that time, I was two months away from the end of my year. So I never really thought about quitting.

Since all that has happened with the book, people ask why I do not resign. My answer is that I have no reason to do so. I wrote a book documenting what I saw in Iraq. I am certain that had you followed me around for a year you would have seen and heard what I wrote down. I see what I did as documentary, not necessarily dissent per se. In that what I saw and wrote deviates from what State's vision of Iraq is is I guess the issue. I note that no one, not a single person in the USG nor any reviewer, has contested anything in the book. No one has said, hey, that story about the chicken plant is wrong, or incomplete or made up. No one, nothing. All of the attacks, the criticism, has been ad hominem attacks against me as a person. State people say I should not air dirty laundry, or I should use the dissent channel, or I should have been more respectful in my language, less sarcastic in tone like a “diplomat” should be, I should have done this or that. But no one has challenged the content, and that is because they really can't. It is all true.

So why should I have quit? Why should I resign? I just wrote a book. Instead, I'd like to get back to work. The languages I speak, the skills I have, the experience I developed over 23 years has not changed. It is more like I have failed some ideological test.

Reports are that you lost your security clearance at the State Department. Why? What is your current role at the Department?

Ostensibly my security clearance was suspended because I linked to a Wikileaks document on my blog in August at, but it seems to me it has more to do with the book than that single blog post.

As I write this, my security clearance is still “temporarily suspended” and I am still on “admin leave” for over 40 days. I am prohibited in writing from entering any State Department facility. Human Resources physically took away my badge. I am paid because Foreign Service rules require that for Foreign Service officers (but not if I was a civil servant in similar circumstances) but otherwise the Department has essentially “disappeared” me. I belong to no office, cannot enter any building and might as well have a scarlet A carved into my forehead. I feel no shame over this (maybe some disappointment, some bitterness) and have openly discussed my situation on my blog at. I believe in sunshine as the best cure for bureaucracy, and so have posted most of the documents connected with my situation and keep things updated as to my status.

Does the State Department, in your view, need to be reformed? If so, how?

Yes. The reforms needed are pretty much covered in my next answer.

Would you advise young -- and not so young -- people to join the US Foreign Service?

Before getting dumped into admin leave limbo, my position was at the Board of Examiners, where for over a year since returning from Iraq I administered the Oral Exam and helped choose the next generation of Foreign Service officers. I was competent at the task, got a good performance review and, after a year on the job, it was only after my book came out that State decided I could not work there.

So, I spent a lot of time around people interested in a Foreign Service career. They did not ask for advice and at the Board we did not offer it. However, since my book came out and I have gotten some media attention, ironically more people now approach me with your same question about joining the Foreign Service. Too much irony these days.

What I tell them is this: think very, very carefully about a Foreign Service career. The State Department is looking for a very specific kind of person and if you are that person, you will enjoy your career and be successful. I have come to understand that the Department wants smart people who will do what they are told, believing that intelligence can be divorced from innovation and creativity. Happy, content compliance is a necessary trait. The Department will not give you any real opportunity for input for a very long time, years, if ever. Even Consular work, which used to offer some space, now has fallen victim to standardization as posts must conform web sites to a single model, for example. There is no agreed-upon definition of success or even progress at State, no profits, no battles won, no stock prices to measure. Success will be to simply continue to exist, or whatever your boss says it is, or both, or neither. You may never know what the point is other than a Congressional delegation go away “happy,” whatever that even is.

At the same time, State has created a personnel system that will require you to serve in more and more dangerous places, and more and more unaccompanied places, as a routine. That sounds cool and adventurous at age 25, but try and imagine if you'd still be happy with it at age 45 with a spouse and two kids. What are your core obligations with a child who needs some extreme parenting as you leave your wife at home alone with him for a year?

Understand that promotions and assignments are more and more opaque. Changes in Congress will further limit pay and benefits. Your spouse will be un/under employed most of his/her life. Your kids will change schools for better or worse every one, two or three years. Some schools will be good, some not so good, and you'll have no choice unless you are willing to subvert your career choices to school choices, as in let’s go to Bogota because the schools are good even if the assignment otherwise stinks. You'll serve more places where you won't speak the language and get less training as requirements grow without personnel growth. As you get up there, remember your boss can arbitrarily be a used car salesman who donated big to the President's campaign. Make sure all these conditions make sense to you now, and, if you can, as you imagine yourself 10, 15 and 20 years into the future. It is a very unique person who can say “Yes” truthfully and after real soul-searching.

According to the Washington Post (“State Department readies Iraq operation, its biggest since Marshall Plan”), the Department will be in charge of 16,000 civilians dispatched to Iraq “to take over Iraq operations from the U.S. military." What advice would you give these civilians?

Think carefully about accepting your assignment.

Security post-military withdrawal is a huge unknown. Will civil war restart in Iraq? Will Sadr, et al, target the Embassy? Will State's mercenary army of contractors work out? If you are injured, where in Iraq will you get care past simple first aid? Where will the blood supply come from, the burn unit, the class A trauma care? Quite literally, will you live through your assignment or will you die in place as a symbol of State's “commitment?” Be sure to read my most recent piece on The Huffington Post at.

What will you do there? If you are just going to punch a ticket and/or maybe make money, this may not matter. Otherwise, how will you feel about perhaps never/rarely leaving the compound? Meeting only with select members of the Iraqi government? In fact, what will 16,000 people really do? Is there that much work in Iraq, more than in Beijing, Tokyo, London or wherever? How much busy-work are you comfortable with for a year?

If you work in Management or Diplomatic Security, will you be content as largely a contract manager? Do you conceive your role as primarily making sure contractors do their jobs? Are you comfortable when the Inspector General comes looking a few years from now with the things you'll be required to sign off on?

Are you happy with the rewards versus the costs? With Iraq, Afghan and Pakistan service becoming the norm, there are no more automatic promotions, far fewer magic assignments from Baghdad to Paris, little to no corridor reputation credibility left. Talk with your colleagues if they'll talk about the rampant drinking on compounds, the infidelity, the mental health costs.

Make sure the juice is worth the squeeze before you accept that assignment to Iraq.

And finally, a more general question: What is your vision of the global role of the United States in the 21st century?

The U.S. will face a continued stagnation on the world stage. When we, perhaps semi-consciously, made a decision to accept an Empire role after World War II, we never build the tools of Empire. No colonial service, no securing of critical resources, no carrot and sticks. We sort of settled on a military-only model of soft occupation. We made few friends or allies, accepting reluctant partners. As changes take place in the developing world, the most likely American people there encounter now wears a uniform and carries a weapon. By ideologicizing every challenge from Communism to the entire religion of Islam, we have assured ourselves of never really winning any struggle.

America faced a choice and blew it. As an Empire, we either needed to take control of the world's oil or create a more equitable and less martial global society to ensure our access to it. We did neither. We needed either to create a colonial system for adventures like Iraq or Afghanistan along the Victorian model, or not try to invade and rebuild those places. We did neither.

Simply pouring more and more lives and money into the military is a one way street going in the wrong direction. We can keep spending, but when millions of dollars spent on weapons can be deflected by terror acts that cost nothing, we will lose. When any hearts and minds efforts are derailed by yet another excused collateral damage episode, we will lose.

For most of the next century, America still has a big enough military that our “decline” will be slow, bloody and reluctant. But, inevitable nonetheless.

[1] See (JB footnote)

Response to yet another unbearable "Barack" ad

2011-11-22T10:08:00.001-08:00

JB response to the below:

"Another obscene ad. Get your act together or we'll occupy you!"

5:10 PM
Reply ▼Reply
Reply all
Forward
Delete
Mark as unread
Mark as read
Delete all from sender
Print message
View message source
Show message history
Hide message history
Show details
Hide details John BrownTo info@barackobama.com
From: John Brown (johnhbrown30@hotmail.com)
Sent: Tue 11/22/11 5:10 PM
To: info@barackobama.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:07:07 -0500
To: johnhbrown30@hotmail.com
From: info@barackobama.com
Subject: You and a guest

John --

A few Thursdays ago, I had dinner with four Americans named Ken, Casey, Juanita, and Wendi -- the winners of the campaign's first Dinner with Barack contest.

I loved getting to know each of them.

We're taking names for the next dinner starting now, and this time I want to add a new feature: If you win, you can bring a guest.

Chip in $3 or more today to be automatically entered to win a spot for you and a guest at the next dinner.

The folks who this election is all about tend to fall under the radar of the D.C. pundits and traditional news media.

They're people like Juanita, who helped put her three sons through college on a teacher's salary while saving what she could for retirement.

Like Ken, a single dad who stood by his mother as she fought insurance companies while battling two forms of cancer.

They're like Casey, whose three young kids may not yet appreciate what courage it took for their dad to take a chance and start his own business.

And Wendi, an artist and third-generation teacher who canvassed, marched, and phone banked in Indiana in 2008, the year her home state defied the traditional electoral map.

These people weren't just there for themselves -- they were representing you, this movement, and the folks I go to work for every day as president.

These dinners are important to me because I want to spend time whenever I can with the people who sent me here. They're proving wrong the conventional wisdom that says campaigns should cater to Washington lobbyists and powerful interests. And they're an important reminder that this movement -- and my presidency -- have never just been about me.

I'm proud that we're choosing to run the kind of campaign where a dinner like this isn't just possible, it's a regular thing. And next time, I don't just want to meet you -- I want to meet someone else in your life.

Donate $3 or more, and start thinking about who you'll invite to dinner:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner

Thanks for being part of this,

Barack

American Public Diplomacy at Its Most Vulgar

2011-11-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

Vientiane: US Ambassador Stewart Raps at StreetWave05 (VIDEO)

See also (1) and (2). For a more positive coverage of the Stewart Rap, see.

Lincoln/Lenin

2011-11-20T23:36:00.001-08:00

IMAGES

--Proposal for the Lincoln Memorial by John Russell Pope, 1912.

--Lenin Mausoleum; image from

American Nations by Colin Woodard

2011-11-19T05:08:00.000-08:00

‘American Nations’ by Colin Woodard, a study of our ‘rival regional cultures’
By Alec MacGillis, Published: Washington Post, November 18

The day after the 2008 election, a remarkable map began making the rounds online. It showed the counties where John McCain had won more of the vote than George W. Bush had in his victory four years earlier. It was a nearly contiguous swath of the country, stretching from southwestern Pennsylvania through Appalachia, west across the upland South and into Oklahoma and north-central Texas.

Presumably, something other than a singular affection for the latest Republican presidential candidate had allowed McCain to outperform Bush in this neck of the woods. But still, why this exact outline of the anti-Obama vote? What was behind it?

These sorts of questions may be easier to answer after reading Colin Woodard’s “American Nations,” a compelling and informative attempt to make sense of the regional divides in North America in general and this country in particular. This may seem like well-marked territory — Joel Garreau’s “The Nine Nations of North America” (1981) is only one of many studies of what came to be simplified as the country’s red-blue split. But Woodard sets his political geography apart by delving deep into history, building on the insights of David Hackett Fischer’s “Albion’s Seed,” a 1989 analysis of the four “British folkways” in America, to demonstrate that trends in contemporary political behavior can be traced back to well before the country’s founding. Woodard provides a bracing corrective to an accepted national narrative that too often overlooks regional variations to tell a simpler and more reassuring story.

As Woodard sees it, the continent has long been divided into 11 rival regional “nations” determined by centuries-old settlement patterns. Yankeedom stretches from the Puritans’ New England to the land settled by their descendants in Upstate New York and the upper Midwest. New Netherland is Greater New York City, more interested in making money than in Yankee moralizing.

The Midlands stretch from once-Quaker Philadelphia across the heart of the Midwest — German-dominated, open-minded and less inclined toward activist government than Yankeedom. Cavalier-founded Tidewater once ruled supreme but was hemmed in and saw its clout fade.

The Deep South stretches to East Texas, long in tension but less so now with the Borderlanders, the feisty, individualistic Scots-Irish who scorned both the community-minded Yankees and the aristocrats of the Tidewater and the Deep South. The Borderlanders’ domain spans Appalachia, the southern Midwest and the upland South — the McCain stronghold described above.

Predating all these are First Nation, Canada’s indigenous north; New France, based in what is now Quebec, whose liberalism traces to the first fur traders; and El Norte, the territory straddling the Mexican border that was once a region unto itself (of colonial Mexico). Settled last were the interior Far West and the Left Coast, the latter a mix of the idealism of the Yankees who tried to settle it and the individualism of gold-seeking Borderlanders.

These nations looked different from the start: Where Yankeedom had countless towns, Tidewater had barely any — planters simply delivered supplies to their estates up the Chesapeake’s tributaries. The nations mistrusted each other deeply. And they often resorted to arms — the book reminds us of long-forgotten conflicts such as the Paxton Boys’ Borderlander assault on Midlander Philadelphia in 1764 and the Yankee-Pennamite wars in northern Pennsylvania in the late 18th century.

In Woodard’s retelling, the country was unified in spite of itself. The Revolutionary War was a true insurgency only in Yankeedom; meanwhile, New Netherland became a Loyalist refuge, the pacifist-minded Midlanders lay low, the Deep Southern planters calculated how best to preserve (and expand) their slave economy, the Tidewater split into two camps, and the Borderlanders wrestled over whom they hated more — the British or the coastal elites oppressing them.

The new Constitution hardly sealed things tight. The Borderlanders waged the Whiskey Rebellion and made an aborted attempt to create their own state of Franklin, while Yankeedom grew so alarmed over the shift in power to the Tidewater that it nearly demanded a renegotiation of the Constitution in 1814.

The Civil War also started in Yankeedom, with its moralizing abolitionists. It was only thanks to a late shift by Midlander voters that Abraham Lincoln was elected. It was only after the secessionists fired on Fort Sumter that New Netherland, the Midlands and Borderlanders rallied to Yankeedom’s side. And the war that saved the union only exacerbated some divides — for one thing, Reconstruction broadened the Yankee-Borderlander split.

“Since 1877, the driving force in American politics hasn’t primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or even between competing partisan ideologies, although each has played a role,” Woodard writes. “Ultimately, the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom.”

Throughout, Woodard sprinkles nuggets that make the country’s current divides seem more explicable. Blue-staters unsettled by Rick Perry’s “day of prayer” should know that, in 1801, some 20,000 Borderlanders gathered in Cane Ridge, Ky., for a Christian revival where “hundreds fell prostrate under the mighty power of God, as men slain in battle.” Red-staters who suspect coastal Yankees of viewing the interior as a foreign country will be amused to know that one group of New Englanders sailing down the Ohio River to settle (and civilize) the Midwest called their ship “Mayflower of the West.” Anyone who thinks culture-war rhetoric is unique to our times should know that George Fitzhugh, a strongly pro-slavery Virginian, cast the Civil War as a clash between “Christians and infidels . . . the chaste and the libidinous; between marriage and free love.”

In any synthesis as sweeping as this, there are bound to be holes. Woodard skirts some inconvenient facts (for instance, New York became the commercial capital not only because of its Dutch roots, but because of the Erie Canal). He addresses the most obvious counterargument to his thesis, that regional cultures could hardly have held static in a land of immigrants and high mobility — arguing fairly persuasively that new arrivals adapted more to the cultures they found than vice versa — but he does not reckon with some major population shifts, such as the Great Migration of blacks to the North.

When his timeline reaches the late 20th century, the distinctions among his many nations blur into a more general blue-red divide. And while he is appealingly acerbic in characterizing the nations’ flaws, including Yankee priggishness, Woodard, a proud Mainer, comes down far hardest on the Deep South. Readers will differ on whether that’s merited.

Woodard concludes on a pessimistic note, wondering whether the bonds among his nations can hold. (He provocatively suggests that Canada has found the answer by accepting its binational, bilingual status.) I would have liked to see him wrestle with this question a bit more than he does. It’s easy to conclude from his tale that the country must resort to a more loosely federalist structure, devolving more power to the states, but is that really what Woodard wants?

Does the poor, uninsured family in East Texas have to accept its fate, just because it lives in “Deep South Nation”? Or is it part of what defines America to have Yankeedom meddling from beyond, despite the resentment of local elites? It is an age-old clash of values that “American Nations” captures well.

Alec MacGillis is a senior editor at the New Republic.

Putin/Medvedev - Hoover/Tolson: Viva Male Bonding?

2011-11-17T21:18:00.000-08:00

As a Russophile -- not to speak of being an Americanophile as well -- I cannot help but wonder about parallels between the Putin/Medvedev political ménage à deux

and the Hoover/Tolson relationship, both intimate rapports that evidently (if one trusts the press) go beyond the public sphere. The boss for decades of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI"), Edgar J. Hoover (deceased) studied law at George Washington University. He was the A+ G-man, just as Putin (still living) was KGB "at its best" in the good old days of a Soviet "empire."

Law-educated Clyde Tolson was Hoover's no. 2 man for innumerable years. Medvedev, also trained in law, is Putin's numero duo; Putin studied law in then-Leningrad. It should also be noted that

Putin, like

Hoover, has acquired the sympathy of the popolo minuto for being a macho man who's "tough on crime."

Of course, nothing wrong with male bonding, in Russia or the United States, so long as it does not interfere with our civil rights, both in the USA and the Russian Federation.

Top image from; middle images from and from; below image from

P.S. Please note "WikiLeaks cables: Dmitry Medvedev 'plays Robin to Putin's Batman'"

Image from article

Poète et non honnête homme

2011-11-17T15:03:00.000-08:00

Rimbaud

"Apart from writing the classics of modern literature that made him the toast of Paris, Rimbaud had found time to seduce Paul Verlaine away from wife and child and torture him to the point of attempted murder, had brawled, idled, smoked hashish, drunk absinthe, been arrested, wandered across Europe, wallowed in the violent excesses of the Commune, enlisted in and deserted from the Carlist army, and renounced literature.

He also learnt to play the piano."

--Nigel Barley, The Times Literary Supplement (November 11, 2011), p. 7

Image from

Review of Peter Van Buren's book "We Meant Well," an illustration of a failure of US public diplomacy

2011-11-16T12:21:00.000-08:00

We Meant Well Reviewed by John H. Brown, American Diplomacy (October 19, 2011)

Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, New York Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2011 ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-9436-7 Hardback, 288 pp. $25

State Department twenty-three-year veteran Peter Van Buren served in Iraq for twelve months in 2009 “as part of the civilian Surge deployed to backstop the manlier military one.” (1) He worked in an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (ePRT) on a Forward Operating Base (FOB). His first FOB, Hammer, was in the desert, halfway between Baghdad and Iran. His second, FOB Falcon, was located south of the capital. His duties were “to meet with Iraqis, hand them money for the projects we hoped would spring up, and then assess the results of our spending.”

In 2009 and 2010, Van Buren points out, suicide caused more deaths among the U.S. military than combat. While often depressed during his tour and missing his family “terribly,” the very rational Van Buren opted, thank God, for staying alive, keeping sane by scrupulously observing the situation around him. The result is this black-humor book, personal and often very funny, which recounts, from an “on the ground” perspective, the pathetic and tragic American attempt to remake the cradle of civilization.

In snappy, brief chapters (titles: “Help Wanted, No Experience Necessary,” “Haircuts and Prostitution,” “Chicken Shit”), Van Buren provides numerous examples of waste, lack of coordination among U.S. government agencies, overpaid contractors (some earning $250,000 a year), and unqualified “experts” coming to Iraq knowing little about the country. Among the projects taxpayers paid for was an effort — pure theater of the absurd — to provide Iraqi widows with fifteen beekeeping sets at the cost of just under $25,000. But “widows were not as keen to keep bees as we thought, showing roughly the same enthusiasm as they had for short skirts.” So, Van Buren notes, “we did not have any extra widows to give the stuff to.”

But forget about widows and bees. What really mattered for Americans dumped by the USG in Iraq was how well their pet reconstruction projects (such as $2.58 million for a chicken-processing plant in Iraq that led nowhere) could be hyped to please higher-ups as well attract media attention. Van Buren:

How many PTR staff members does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to hire a contractor who fails to complete the job and two to write the press release in the dark. We measured the impact of our projects on us, not by their effects on the Iraqis.

Of the many boondoggles witnessed by Van Buren is the Vatican-city-sized American Embassy in Baghdad and its staff (“male, pale, and Yale ... their work involved staying in the Embassy and sending important memos”). In one of many passages making one laugh in order not to groan, he describes efforts by the U.S. ambassador to have a grass lawn in front of the main Embassy building in the heavily protected “Green Zone,” a world apart from the dangerous “Red Zone” outside the compound, where the dreaded “bad guys” lurked.

No one dared to admit the cost of this exercise in herbaceous futility, which included sod to be brought from Kuwait delivered to the Embassy by armored convoy. But the project reportedly required expenditures of between two and five million dollars. “The grass,” Van Buren notes, “was the perfect allegory for the whole war.”

Despite all the grass we grew, our “meaning well” in Iraq by no means resulted in universal love toward the US occupiers. “I remember”, writes Van Buren, “when we tried to give away fruit tree seedlings a farmer spat on the ground and said: ‘You killed my son and now you are giving me a tree?’”

Van Buren does cite rare projects that resulted in some local good will, such as organizing a 4-H club in Mahmudiyah, which “set down tender, delicious roots.” But the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people ended mostly in defeat. Indeed, Van Buren learned, Iraqis nostalgically preferred the colonial British to the PRT Americans. Under Mesopotamian eyes (and, evidently, Van Buren’s own as well), the British “conquered the world with good administrators. Their officers were highly educated, committed, conscientious, hardworking, and conversant in the local language — regular Flashman in the Great Game characters.”

Despite all his self-deprecating humor, the above quotation suggests there is something of a Victorian noblesse oblige in the intelligent and sensitive Peter Van Buren. This attitude is, perhaps, an understandable reaction to the crudity and parochialism of many of his American military and civilian colleagues as he depicts them. It also could have stemmed from his evident lack of trust in, and enthusiasm about, the tribal nature of Iraqi society (about which he knew little, he readily admits). Local sheiks, to him, were little more than thugs with whom he had no choice but to do business in order to appear to be getting things done, no matter how absurd they were.

The State Department, The Washington Post reports, “is racing against an end-of-year deadline to take over Iraq operations from the U.S. military.” (2) If the 16,000 civilians taking part in this massive initiative wish to prevent their assignments from being doomed to failure, I suggest they place Peter Van Buren’s unsettling “lessons learned” book very high on their reading list.

(1) Full disclosure: I was one three US diplomats who left our Foreign Service in opposition to the planned war in Iraq. Full text of my unanswered email to Secretary of State Colin Powell regarding my decision at: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0312-11.htm. See also http://www.afsa.org/fsj/sept03/brown.pdf

(2) Mary Beth Sheridan and Dan Zak, “State Department readies Iraq operation, its biggest since Marshall Plan,” Washington Post (October 7, 2011) http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/state-department-readies-iraq-operation-its-biggest-since-marshall-plan/2011/10/05/gIQAzRruTL_print.html

Image from article

The Age of Kennan

2011-11-12T04:18:00.000-08:00

November 10, 2011
The Age of KennanBy HENRY A. KISSINGER

Review of:
GEORGE F. KENNAN:
An American Life
by John Lewis Gaddis

Illustrated. 784 pp. The Penguin Press. $39.95.

While writing this essay, I asked several young men and women what George F. Kennan meant to them. As it turned out, nearly all were essentially oblivious of the man or his role in shaping American foreign policy. Yet Kennan had fashioned the concept of containment in the name of which the cold war was conducted and won and almost concurrently had also expressed some of the most trenchant criticism of the way his own theory was being implemented. To the present generation, Kennan has receded into a vague past as has their parents’ struggle to bring forth a new international order amid the awesome, unprecedented power of nuclear weapons.

For the surviving participants in the emotions of that period, this state of affairs inspires melancholy reflections about the relevance of history in the age of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Fortunately, John Lewis Gaddis, a distinguished professor of history and strategy at Yale, has brought again to life the dilemmas and aspirations of those pivotal decades of the mid-20th century. His magisterial work, “George F. Kennan: An American Life,” bids fair to be as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants. The reader should know that for the past decade, I have occasionally met with the students of the Grand Strategy seminar John Gaddis conducts at Yale and that we encounter each other on social occasions from time to time. But Gaddis’s work is seminal and beyond personal relationships.

George Kennan’s thought suffused American foreign policy on both sides of the intellectual and ideological dividing lines for nearly half a century. Yet the highest position he ever held was ambassador to Moscow for five months in 1952 and to Yugoslavia for two years in the early 1960s. In Washington, he never rose above director of policy planning at the State Department, a position he occupied from 1947 to 1950. Yet his precepts helped shape both the foreign policy of the cold war as well as the arguments of its opponents after he renounced — early on — the application of his maxims.

A brilliant analyst of long-term trends and a singularly gifted prose stylist, Kennan, as a relatively junior Foreign Service officer, served in the entourages of Secretaries of State George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson. His fluency in German and Russian, as well as his knowledge of those countries’ histories and literary traditions, combined with a commanding, if contradictory, personality. Kennan was austere yet could also be convivial, playing his guitar at embassy events; pious but given to love affairs (in the management of which he later instructed his son in writing); endlessly introspective and ultimately remote. He was, a critic once charged, “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”

For all these qualities — and perhaps because of them — Kennan was never vouchsafed the opportunity actually to execute his sensitive and farsighted visions at the highest levels of government. And he blighted his career in government by a tendency to recoil from the implications of his own views. The debate in America between idealism and realism, which continues to this day, played itself out inside Kennan’s soul. Though he often expressed doubt about the ability of his fellow Americans to grasp the complexity of his perceptions, he also reflected in his own person a very American ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy.

When his analytical brilliance was rewarded with ambassadorial appointments, to the Soviet Union and then to Yugoslavia, Kennan self-destructed while disregarding his own precepts. The author of trenchant analyses of Soviet morbid sensitivity to slights and of the Kremlin’s penchant for parsing every word of American diplomats, he torpedoed his Moscow mission after just a few months. Offended by the constrictions of everyday living in Stalin’s Moscow, Kennan compared his hosts to Nazi Germany in an offhand comment to a journalist at Tempelhof airport in Berlin. As a result, he was declared persona non grata — the only American ambassador to Russia to suffer this fate. Similarly, in Belgrade a decade later, Kennan reacted to Tito’s affirmation of neutrality on the issue of the Soviet threat to Berlin as if it were a personal slight. Yet Tito’s was precisely the kind of neutralist balancing act Kennan had brilliantly analyzed when it had been directed against the Soviet Union. Shortly afterward, Kennan resigned.

Nonetheless, no other Foreign Service officer ever shaped American foreign policy so decisively or did so much to define the broader public debate over America’s world role. This process began with two documents remembered as the Long Telegram (in 1946) and the X article (in 1947). At this stage, Kennan served a country that had not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the evolution of an adversary — if indeed it ever will. Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue one’s ultimate foreign policy goal in imperfect stages.

America had conducted its wartime diplomacy on the premise that Stalin had abandoned Soviet history. The dominant view in policy-making circles was that Moscow had embraced peaceful coexistence with the United States and would adjust differences that might arise by quasi-legal or diplomatic processes. At the apex of that international order would be the newly formed United Nations. The United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were to be the joint guardians. (China and France were later additions.)

Kennan had rejected the proposition of an inherent American-Soviet harmony from the moment it was put forward and repeatedly criticized what he considered Washington’s excessively accommodating stance on Soviet territorial advances. In February 1946, the United States Embassy in Moscow received a query from Washington as to whether a doctrinaire speech by Stalin inaugurated a change in the Soviet commitment to a harmonious international order. The ambassador was away, and Kennan, at that time 42 and deputy chief of mission, replied in a five-part telegram of 19 single-spaced pages. The essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that Stalin, far from changing policy, was in fact implementing a particularly robust version of traditional Russian designs. These grew out of Russia’s strategic culture and its centuries-old distrust of the outside world, onto which the Bolsheviks had grafted an implacable revolutionary doctrine of global sweep. Soviet leaders would not be swayed by good-will gestures. They had devoted their lives (and sacrificed millions of their compatriots) to an ideology positing a fundamental conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds. Marxist dogma rendered even more truculent by the Leninist interpretation was, Kennan wrote, “justification for their instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value. . . . Today they cannot dispense with it.”

The United States, Kennan insisted (sometimes in telegramese), was obliged to deal with this inherent hostility. With many of the world’s traditional power centers devastated and the Soviet leadership controlling vast natural resources and “the energies of one of world’s greatest peoples,” a contest about the nature of world order was inevitable. This would be “undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face.”

In 1947, Kennan went public in a briefly anonymous article published in Foreign Affairs, signed by “X.” Among the thousands of articles produced on the subject, Kennan’s stands in a class by itself. Lucidly written, passionately argued, it elevated the debate to a philosophy of history.

The X article condensed the Long Telegram and gave it an apocalyptic vision. Soviet foreign policy represented “a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.” The only way to deal with Moscow was by “a policy of firm containment designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”

So far this was a doctrine of equilibrium much like what a British foreign secretary in the 19th century might have counseled in dealing with a rising power — though the British foreign secretary would not have felt the need to define a final outcome. What conferred a dramatic quality on the X article was the way Kennan combined it with the historic American dream of the ultimate conversion of the adversary. Victory would come not on the battlefield nor even by diplomacy but by the implosion of the Soviet system. It was “entirely possible for the United States to influence by its actions” this eventuality. At some point in Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world — so long as the West took care they remained futile — some Soviet leader would feel the need to achieve additional support by reaching down to the immature and inexperienced masses. But if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed over night from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”

No other document forecast so presciently what would in fact occur under Mikhail Gorbachev. But that was four decades away. It left a number of issues open: How was a situation of strength to be defined? How was it to be built and then conveyed to the adversary? And how would it be sustained in the face of Soviet challenges?

Kennan never dealt with these issues. It took Dean Acheson to translate Kennan’s concept into the design that saw America through the cold war. As under secretary to George Marshall, Acheson worked on the Marshall Plan and, as secretary of state, created NATO, encouraged European unification and brought Germany into the Atlantic structure. In the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles extended the alliance system through the Baghdad Pact for the Middle East and SEATO for Southeast Asia. In effect, containment came to be equated with constructing military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents.

The practical consequence was to shelve East-West diplomacy while the positions of strength were being built. The diplomatic initiative was left to the Soviet Union, which concentrated on Western weak points, or where it calculated that it had an inherent advantage (as in the exposed position of Berlin). Paradoxically containment, while hardheaded in its absolute opposition to the further expansion of the Soviet sphere, failed to reflect the real balance of forces. For with the American atomic monopoly — and the huge Soviet losses in the world war — that actual balance was never more favorable for the West than at the beginning of the cold war. A situation of strength did not need to be built; it already existed.

The most illustrious advocate of this point of view was Winston Churchill. In a series of speeches between 1946 and 1952, he called for diplomatic initiatives to produce a European settlement while American strength was still preponderant. The American policy based on the X article appealed for endurance so that history could display its inevitable tendencies. Churchill warned of the psychological strain of a seemingly endless strategic stalemate.

At the same time that Churchill was urging an immediate diplomatic confrontation, Kennan was growing impatient with Washington’s tendency to equate containment with a largely military strategy. He disavowed the global application of his principles. As he so often did, he pushed them to their abstract extreme, arguing that there were some regions “where you could perfectly well let people fall prey to totalitarian domination without any tragic consequences for world peace in general.” We could not bomb the Soviets into submission, nor convince them to see things our way; we had, in fact, no direct means to change the Soviet regime. We had instead to wait out an unsettled situation and occasionally mitigate it with diplomacy.

The issue became an aspect of the perennial debate between a realism stressing the importance of assessing power relationships and an idealism conflating moral impulses with historical inevitability. It was complicated by Kennan’s tendency to defend on occasion each side of the issue — leading to incisive and quite unsentimental essays and diary entries analyzing the global balance of power, followed by comparable reflections questioning the morality of practicing traditional power politics in the nuclear age.

Stable orders require elements of both power and morality. In a world without equilibrium, the stronger will encounter no restraint, and the weak will find no means of vindication. At the same time, if there is no commitment to the essential justice of existing arrangements, constant challenges or else a crusading attempt to impose value systems are inevitable.

The challenge of statesmanship is to define the components of both power and morality and strike a balance between them. This is not a one-time effort. It requires constant recalibration; it is as much an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise. It implies a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art of the possible. Kennan, as a public servant, was exalted above most others for a penetrating analysis that treated each element of international order separately, yet his career was stymied by his periodic rebellion against the need for a reconciliation that could incorporate each element only imperfectly.

At the beginning of his career, Kennan’s view of the European order was traditional. America should seek, he argued, an equilibrium based on enlightened self-interest and sustained by the permanent introduction of American power. “Heretofore, in our history, we had to take the world pretty much as we found it,” he wrote during the war. “From now on we will have to take it pretty much as we leave it when the crisis is over.” And that required “the firm, consistent and unceasing application of sheer power in accordance with a long-term policy.”

In pursuit of that European equilibrium, Kennan urged Washington and its democratic allies to oblige the Soviet Union to accept borders as far east as possible. In 1944, he proposed that Poland be placed under international trusteeship to prevent its domination by the Soviet Union. But when this was rejected by Roosevelt, who did not want to risk alienating Moscow in the last phase of the war, Kennan adjusted his view to the new realities as he saw them. If the United States was unwilling to force the Soviet Union into acceptable limits, “we should gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” That meant dividing Europe into spheres of influence with the line of division running through Germany. The Western half of Germany should be integrated into a European federation. He called this a “bitterly modest” program, but “beggars can’t be choosers.”

Six years later, Acheson was building an Atlantic partnership in essentially the manner Kennan had proposed. But Kennan rejected it for three reasons: his innate perfectionism, his growing concern about the implications of nuclear war and his exclusion from a role in government.

The irony of Kennan’s thought was that his influence in government arose from his advocacy of what today’s debate would define as realism, while his admirers outside government were on the whole motivated by what they took to be his idealistic objections to the prevalent, essentially realistic policy. His vision of peace involved a balance of power of a very special American type, an equilibrium that was not to be measured by military force alone. It arose as well from the culture and historical evolution of a society whose ultimate power would be measured by its vigor and its people’s commitment to a better world. In the X article, he called on his countrymen to meet the “test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations.”

Kennan saw clearly — more so than a vast majority of his contemporaries — the ultimate outcome of the division of Europe, but less clearly the road to get there. He was too intellectually rigorous to countenance the partial steps needed to reach the vistas he envisioned. Yet policy practice — as opposed to pure analysis — almost inevitably involves both compromise and risk.

This is why Kennan often shrank from the application of his own theories. In 1948, with an allied government in China crumbling, Kennan — at some risk to his career — advanced the minority view that a Communist victory would not necessarily be catastrophic. In a National War College lecture, he argued that “our safety depends on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” A wise policy would induce these forces to “spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us,” so “that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to have the possibility of life.” But when, in 1969, the Nixon administration began to implement almost exactly that policy, Kennan called on me at the White House, in the company of a distinguished group of former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, to warn against proceeding with overtures to China lest the Soviet Union respond by war.

So emphatically did Kennan sometimes reject the immediately feasible that he destroyed his usefulness in the conduct of day-to-day diplomacy. This turned his life into a special kind of tragedy. Until his old age, he yearned for the role in public service to which his brilliance and vision should have propelled him, but that was always denied him by his refusal to modify his perfectionism.

A major element in this refusal was Kennan’s growing repugnance at the prospect of nuclear war. From the beginning of the nuclear age, he emphasized that the new weapons progressively destroyed the relationship between military and political objectives. Historically, wars had been fought because the prospect of accommodation seemed more onerous than the consequences of defeat. But when nuclear war implied tens of millions of casualties — and arguably the end of civilization — that equation was turned on its head.

The most haunting problem for modern policy makers became what they would in fact do when the limit of diplomatic options had been reached: Did any leader or group of leaders have the right to assume the moral responsibility for taking risks capable of destroying civilized order? But by the same calculus, could any leader or group of leaders assume the responsibility for abandoning nuclear deterrence and turn the world over to groups with possibly genocidal tendencies? Acheson chose the risk of deterrence, probably convinced that he would never have to implement it. Kennan abandoned deterrence and the nuclear option, at one stage even seeking to organize a no-first-use pledge from American policy makers and musing publicly in an interview whether Soviet dominance over Western Europe might not be preferable to nuclear war.

When Kennan was operating in the realm of philosophy, he tended to push matters to passionate and abstract conclusions. Yet under pressure of concrete events, he would swing back to the role of a hard-nosed advocate of specific operational policies. After the Chinese offensive across the Yalu in 1950, he overcame his distaste for Acheson’s more militant policy to urge him to refuse any attempt at diplomacy with the Communist world and instead adopt a Churchillian posture of defiance. Similarly, in 1968, his decade-long advocacy of military disengagement in Europe did not keep him from urging President Johnson to respond to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia by sending another 100,000 troops to Europe.

It was my good fortune to know both Acheson and Kennan at or near the height of their intellectual powers. Acheson was the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period. He designed the application of the concepts for which Kennan was the earliest and most eloquent spokesman. The growing estrangement between these two giants of American foreign policy was as sad as it was inevitable. Acheson was indispensable for the architecture of the immediate postwar decade; Kennan’s view raised the issues of a more distant future. Acheson considered Kennan more significant for literature than for policy making and wholly impractical. Kennan’s reaction was frustration at his growing irrelevance to policy making and his inability to convey his long-term view.

On the issues of the day, I sided with Acheson and have not changed my views in retrospect. If Europe was to be secured, America did not have the choice between postponing the drawing of dividing lines or implementing a diplomatic process to determine whether dividing lines needed to be drawn at all. The application of Kennan’s evolving theories in the immediate postwar decades (particularly his opposition to NATO, his critique of the Truman doctrine and his call for a negotiated American disengagement from Europe) would have proved as unsettling as Acheson predicted.

At the same time, Kennan deserves recognition for raising the key issues of the long-term future. He warned of a time in which America might strain its domestic resilience by goals beyond the physical and psychological capacity of even the most exceptional society.

Kennan was eloquent in emphasizing the transient nature of a division of the world into military blocs and the ultimate need to transcend it by diplomacy. He came up with remedies that were both too early in the historical process and occasionally too abstract. He at times neglected the importance of timing. Gaddis quotes him as pointing out that he had problems with sequencing: “I have the habit of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself, so that I appear to be inconsistent.”

In a turbulent era, Kennan’s consistent themes were balance and restraint. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he applied these convictions to his side of the debate as well. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the Vietnam War but on the limited ground that there was no strategic need for it. He emphasized that the threat posed by Hanoi was exaggerated and that the alleged unity of the Communist world was a myth. But he also warned elsewhere against “violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its place.” He questioned the policy makers’ judgment but not their intent; he understood their dilemmas even as he both criticized and sought to join them.

Oscillating between profound perceptions of both the world of ideas and the world of power, Kennan often found himself caught between them. Out of his inward turmoil emerged themes that, like the movements of a great symphony, none of us who followed could ignore, even when they were occasionally discordant.

s time went on, Kennan retreated into writing history. He did so less as a historian than as a teacher to policy makers, hoping to instruct America in the importance of moderation in objectives and restraint in the use of power. He took as an example the collapse of the European order that led to the outbreak of World War I. He produced two works of exemplary scholarship and elegant writing, “Russia Leaves the War” and “The Decision to Intervene.” He published a book of lectures and essays about the making of American foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century, “American Diplomacy: 1900-1950,” which remains the best short summary of the subject.

Yet Kennan did not derive genuine satisfaction from the accolades that so fulsomely came his way from the nonpolicy world. His partly self-created exile from policy making was accompanied by permanent nostalgia for his calling. In his diary he meticulously recorded the tribute that was paid to him by the American chargé d’affaires at an embassy dinner in Moscow in 1981, noting that no secretary of state had ever paid him comparable attention.

Policy makers, even when respectful, shied away from employing him because the sweep of his vision was both uncomfortable (even when right) and beyond the outer limit of their immediate concerns on the tactical level. And the various protest movements, which took up some of his ideas, added to his discomfort because he could never share their single-minded self-righteousness.

Dean Acheson wrote that separation from high office is like the end of a great love affair — a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensitivities and focused concerns. What is poignant about Kennan’s fate is that his parting came before he reached the pinnacle. He spent the rest of his life as an observer at the threshold of political influence, confined to what he called “the unbroken loneliness of pure research and writing.”

Though he lived until the age of 101 (dying in 2005) and saw many of his prophecies come into being, even the collapse of the Soviet Union did not confer on him the elation of vindication. Rather, it marked in his mind the end of his literary vocation. The need for his influence on policy making had irrevocably disappeared. “Reconcile yourself to the inevitable,” he confided to his diary, “you are never again, in the short remainder of your life, to be permitted to do anything significant.” He put aside the third volume of his majestic history of pre-World War I diplomacy. He had no further lessons to teach his country.

We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, thoughtful, human, self-centered, contradictory, inspirational — a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis’s moving work gives us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was a privilege to be a contemporary.

Early in his career, Kennan wrote that he was resigned to “the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.” Gaddis had the acumen to follow Kennan’s tortured quest and to convince us that Kennan had indeed reached his mountaintop.

Henry A. Kissinger’s latest book, “On China,” was published in May.

An excellent, succinct article on cultural diplomacy/public diplomacy

2011-11-11T06:25:00.000-08:00

See http://www.thevizir.com/world-music-as-cultural-diplomacy

Public Diplomacy Footnote: When People Really Listened (long, long ago)

2011-11-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

"Listening" by the public-diplomacy practitioner is increasingly recommended as a sine qua non for effective PD. But it's not always a sure thing that anyone actually "listens" to a public diplomat, even if he/she tries/pretends to be listening to others. As a footnote to such a situation, I offer this excerpt from The Times Literary Supplement (October 21, 2011, p. 29, review by Peter Marshall of

Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English preachers and their audiences, 1590-1640), which recalls a time and place long, long ago when certain audiences truly listened to the speaker addressing them:

Hunt's book ... [is] a brilliant and original re-examination of the importance of preaching in later Reformation England. Strictly, Hunt's subject is not preaching but hearing: it is in the relationship between a preacher and his congregation (their "interpretative collaboration") that the true meaning lies. This requires imaginative reconstruction of venues and audiences: at Sunday parish sermons, weekday "lectures", and such set pieces as court sermons, assize preaching, and orations from the London pulpit of Paul's Cross. Hunt finds preachers tailoring the message to the audience in front of them, aware that listeners might vote with their feet. ...

Particularly valuable is Hunt's insistence on going beyond the published text in search of the spoken event. Printed sermons tended to be tidied up: eloquent and learned, but politically and theologically cautious. By contrast, the manuscript sermons Hunt has assiduously ferreted out show preachers employing homely language, and shamelessly tugging at the heart strings. In fact, unlike modern academics, desperate to get their thoughts into print, many preachers were deeply suspicious of the press, only gradually coming around to appreciation of its importance during the seventeenth century. The most committed preachers were Puritans, and for the "godly", the "Word of God" was not the bare text of Scripture, but a "latent force" to be activated in the hearts of believers by the living words of the preacher. In late sixteenth-century England, it was the deaf, not the illiterate, who had cause to worry about their prospects for salvation [my emphasis]. Hunt argues that it was an insistence on hearing the Bible expounded in preaching, rather than merely reading the text privately, that formed the key ideological fissure between Puritans and conformist Protestants.

Some ironies ensued: the notion that reading was insufficient without preaching looked alarmingly analogous to the Catholic position that the Bible was insufficient without tradition; "Anglicans" like Richard Hooker stressed the unique authority of Scripture more than their Puritan opponents. ...

Hunt finds pastoral sensitivity, and even empathy for popular culture, in the sermons of godly clergymen. Their task was not to "convert" the people to Protestantism, but to make more committed Protestants out of laypeople who already had some grasp of theological basics.

Image from

Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?

2011-11-08T23:38:00.000-08:00

Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? November 24, 2011
Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Paid For
by Naomi Schaefer Riley
Ivan R. Dee, 195 pp., $22.95

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters
by Benjamin Ginsberg
Oxford University Press, 248 pp., $29.95

The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
by Jerome Karabel
Mariner, 711 pp., $36.95 (paper)

Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class
by Christopher Newfield
Harvard University Press, 395 pp., $21.95 (paper)

Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson
Princeton University Press, 389 pp., $27.95; $19.95 (paper)

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
University of Chicago Press, 259 pp., $70.00; $25.00 (paper)

Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life
by Anthony T. Kronman
Yale University Press, 308 pp., $27.50; $17.00 (paper)

Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education
by Nancy Folbre
New Press, 208 pp., $24.95

American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts. A number of American universities offer their faculty salaries and working conditions, laboratories and libraries that few institutions elsewhere can match. They spend more not only on their staff, but also on their graduate and undergraduate students, than their peers overseas. Though their fees seem enormous by European or Asian standards, they have worked hard in recent years to keep them from deterring poor students by offering more generous aid for undergraduates and by paying full fees for all doctoral students. At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.

Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that’s entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice—and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.

At competitive private colleges and universities, admissions directors reserve places in each class for the children of alumni and potential donors; for athletes, many of whom will make less use of their academic opportunities than their classmates do; and simply for those who can pay. And at universities that boast of their commitment to undergraduate teaching, too many professors gabble through PowerPoint slides twice a week and entrust the face-to-face teaching of actual students to underpaid graduate students and Ph.D.s on short-term contracts, who do their best to impart basic skills in writing and quantitative analysis while earning only a few thousand dollars a course.

It’s not hard to see why colleges and universities resist simple evaluations. There are now almost five thousand universities and colleges—both two-year and four-year—in the US. Millions attend them, including around 40 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old Americans and a great many older students. Postsecondary education stretches from the tree-shaded Olympuses of the Ivy-plus private group and the imposing quadrangles of the great public universities to urban community colleges that run twelve hours a day, surrounded only by vast parking lots that are never big enough to accommodate everyone. It’s private and public, mass and elite, ancient and ivy-covered, contemporary and cutting-edge. No generalization could do justice to this vast and varied scene.

Many—perhaps most—books on the American university fall into two categories. Jeremiads seem to pop off the presses every week. A fair number of them conform to a single type, one that embraces books as varied in their origins as The Faculty Lounges (2011), a blast at professors written by a distinguished journalist, Naomi Schaefer Riley, and The Fall of the Faculty (2011), an attack on administrators written by a distinguished political scientist, Benjamin Ginsberg. Instead of examining these complex communities from multiple points of view, they single out one group of actors as villains. Instead of offering detailed accounts of particular colleges and universities, which could give a sense of the rhythms and textures of academic lives, they pile up stories clipped from popular media and Web pages; describe individual experiences, often egregious ones, as if they marked a general rule; and recycle anecdotes already worn smooth by the handling they have undergone in previous polemical works.

Even so, not all their arrows miss their targets. Riley provides a well-informed and depressing account of the mistreatment of adjunct and contingent faculty. Ginsberg rightly points out that numbers of administrators and professional staffers have grown far more quickly than numbers of faculty, pushing up the costs that students and their families pay without enhancing the academic side of their experience. But when Riley dismisses most research as worthless because a few senior academics say it is, or Ginsberg dismisses the entire class of administrators as idlers interested only in the next pointless conference in Hawaii, both take flight into a realm of higher snark that is fun to read but ultimately unhelpful.

The other set of books is very different. Seriously researched, rich in data, and sometimes adorned with dozens of tables that the uninitiated may find cryptic, works like The Chosen (2005) by Jerome Karabel, Unmaking the Public University (2008) by Christopher Newfield, Crossing the Finish Line (2009) by William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson, and Academically Adrift (2011) by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa focus on particular aspects of the system. They excavate a world of ugly facts and unsatisfactory practices that has the gritty look and feel of reality—a reality that has little to do with the glossy hype of world university ratings.

In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Results varied to some extent. At every institution studied, from research universities to small colleges, some students performed at high levels, and some programs fostered more learning than others. In general, though, two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.

Second, and more depressing: vast numbers of students come to university with no particular interest in their courses and no sense of how these might prepare them for future careers. The desire they cherish, Arum and Roksa write, is to act out “cultural scripts of college life depicted in popular movies such as Animal House (1978) and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002).” Academic studies don’t loom large on their mental maps of the university. Even at the elite University of California, students report that on average they spend “twelve hours [a week] socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies”—and thirteen hours a week studying.

For most of them, in the end, what the university offers is not skills or knowledge but credentials: a diploma that signals employability and basic work discipline. Those who manage to learn a lot often—though happily not always—come from highly educated families and attend highly selective colleges and universities. They are already members of an economic and cultural elite. Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into.

In Britain, as Simon Head has shown in these pages, teachers in university departments are subject to mechanical standards of productivity that are much resented.* But for undergraduates an established system of outside examiners keeps programs across the country honest, ensuring that standards are maintained, even if most students are weak, and providing opportunities for the ablest at every level of the system. American higher education has no comparable system of assessment, and the opportunities that it provides at every level depend on the generosity and engagement of individuals.

In many ways, universities have reshaped themselves over recent decades to support the current version of student life. Particularly in the natural and social sciences, professors are encouraged to feel that it is legitimate to devote most of their energy to research. When they make a discovery, they receive a reward: exemption from time in the classroom. Even those who don’t discover America, as the Italians used to say, spend as much time as they can in the lab or the library. Teaching has been reassigned, more and more, from tenured and tenure-track faculty to graduate students and adjuncts.

In theory, budgetary constraints have forced these measures on reluctant deans. In fact, though, they also make it easier to recruit and retain star academics, whose salaries and research support are costly. It’s a lot easier to convince a Deep Thinker to move to Old Siwash and cogitate for a few graduate students than it is to convince the same Deep Thinker to come teach 120 kids a term.

Even in these supposedly tight times, finally, well-paid administrators and nonacademic professionals proliferate—as do the costly extracurricular activities that they provide, from bonding exercises for freshmen to intercollegiate sports. The message is clear: no one sees classroom learning as a primary pursuit.

Is this a crisis? Arum and Roksa say no, since students and their parents continue to seek and pay for places at colleges and universities, and government and graduate schools continue to accept their products, and corporations continue to hire them (and to spend more than $50 billion a year to train their employees in the skills they need). But those already born into the wealthy and professional classes benefit disproportionately from the best educations. Acquire any sort of college education, and you’ll make more money than you would have if you didn’t. But don’t expect you’ll make what you would have if you had studied applied math at Stanford. And no one knows how long families will be able and willing to pay for four years of largely symbolic training that steadily becomes more expensive and loses impact.

Many reform proposals are circulating—mostly the sort that will make matters worse. In Texas, where the debate about public universities has reached an especially sharp pitch, articulate and well-funded critics demand that faculty teach more students at lower cost. But there’s only one way to accomplish that: pushing still more undergraduates into enormous lecture halls where they have no personal contact with the professor, while putting smaller groups entirely into the hands of harried graduate students and adjuncts. Doing this won’t kindle the young to turn on their Kindles and read in their down time. Surely we don’t want to become even more efficient at turning off our students’ minds than we are already. Online courses, the other popular suggestion, can work well—so long as one also provides competent human supervision online, twenty-four hours a day, which makes such courses just as expensive as the traditional sort.

As William Bowen and his collaborators show in Crossing the Finish Line, our system fails on another level even more unequivocally than it does in generating academic engagement. Recent polemics about graduate education, especially in the humanities, have cited the high rate of attrition—around 50 percent—as clear evidence of a profound failure. Graduate programs certainly need scrutiny and reform. But their losses are hardly distinctive. Attrition is the American way in education at all levels. The whole Rube Goldberg machine leaks at every valve. Fewer than 70 percent of high school students graduate. Just over 70 percent of those graduates will enter some form of postsecondary education. But barely more than half of those who start BA programs will finish them in six years, and only 30 percent of those who start community college will win an associate degree in three years. After that point, most people don’t manage to graduate.

Consider the public universities that offer the vast majority of places in bachelor’s degree programs. A few of them—the University of Virginia, William and Mary, Berkeley—graduate 90 percent or more of their students within six years. Another fifteen or so have six-year graduation rates of 80 percent or higher. At the rest, the numbers are even worse. In New Jersey, the flagship state campus, Rutgers/New Brunswick, has a four-year graduation rate of 52 percent and a six-year rate of 77 percent. 5,835 freshmen begin studies there every year. Of that group, 1,342 will not graduate within six years. Ohio State, Indiana University, Florida State, and Iowa lose a similar proportion of each class. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, historically one of America’s greatest public universities, only 48 percent of undergraduates make it through in four years, though over 30 percent more finish within six years. Yet this is the top, the shiny part of the iceberg that rises above sea level. At some state colleges—and in the for-profit sector—the majority gives up long before graduation day. America, once the world leader in educating its population, is now tenth.

Dropping out may not always be the worst fate: sometimes staying in proves costlier. For whether students lose interest or leave their places, they and their families are now in hock to the eyeballs. During the great expansion period of the late 1950s and 1960s, the numbers of Americans with college and university degrees increased rapidly. So did the practice of requiring a degree for many positions for which the universities provided no technical training. So, finally, did the size of public investment, which came to provide the funds for most higher education. Since states financed a large share of university budgets from tax revenues, tuition charges remained low. Students could borrow the modest amount of money needed to pay their share of tuition, work enough hours to earn what they needed to live on, and still graduate in good order, with only modest debts. If they dropped out, they faced financial difficulties, but not catastrophe, since the amounts involved remained small.

Since the Reagan revolution, however—as Christopher Newfield shows in his detailed study of the California university system—states have transferred more and more of the costs of education from their own budgets to those of students and their families. Flagship state universities set their prices below those of elite private colleges. But they are not cheap by any other standard. At the University of Michigan, an in-state freshman will face total expenses of $25,204, a senior $26,810. At Penn State, an in-state freshman will pay $25,416 for tuition, fees, and living expenses this year. In a great many cases, family savings, student earnings, and scholarship aid fall short of these amounts, and students and their parents must borrow the rest. This year, students who borrow in order to study, as two thirds do, will end up on average owing $33,798 when they graduate—twice as much as the average debt ten years ago. So much for those four relaxed years in college, all too often purchased at the expense of ten subsequent years or more in debt peonage.

Americans, as Malcolm Harris recently pointed out, now owe almost a trillion dollars in student loans, more than they owe in credit card debt. Student debt, he explained, “is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits.” The burden is distributed by the reverse of the Matthew principle: to him who hath not, no one gives anything. Poor students and students of color borrow more than white students. They also, perhaps because they know little about them, make less use than they could of the federal Stafford and Parent Plus programs, which are relatively cheap; they are more dependant on private lenders whom Dante would have consigned, with credit card administrators, to the lowest circle of the Inferno.

All this to pay for an education that—as we have already seen—means little, intellectually, to many of those who are courting debtors’ prison to pay for it. The unkindest cut of all, of course, is that those who drop out must still carry the full burden of the loans that so many of them have taken out—even though they will, in all probability, earn less and fare worse in hard times than graduates. Yet even unemployment among graduates has been rising—as have rates of student loan default.

Is the higher education bubble about to pop? I don’t know. The more thoughtful writers warn against monocausal explanations. Bowen and his colleagues, for example, test the effects of student loans on attrition rates. They conclude that it is not clear that debt is a primary cause of student failure. Still, these developments are interwoven, in the experience of many students if not in the intentions of legislators. Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops.

It’s no wonder, in these circumstances, that many students never really internalize the new demands and standards of university work. Instead they drift from course to course, looking for entertainment and easy grades. Nor is it surprising that many aren’t ready when trouble comes. Students drink too much alcohol, smoke too much marijuana, play too many computer games, wreck cars, become pregnant, get overwhelmed trying to help anorexic roommates, and too often lose the modest but vital support previously provided by a parent who has been laid off. Older students—and these days most are older than traditional university age—often have to work full-time and care for children or parents, or both. Those likeliest to encounter these problems are also the ones who haven’t been schooled since birth to find the thread that can lead them through the labyrinths of the bureaucracy. They aren’t confident that they will see an invitingly open door, where a friendly adviser or professor is eager to help them, and they don’t have parents hovering, eager to find that helper for them.

Happily, many students not only survive but flourish in the teeth of these obstacles. Many faculty members and administrators do their best to help. University cultures, like politics, are local. Many state schools are floundering—for example, the much-ballyhooed Arizona States. But many manage to cap class sizes and keep professors busy teaching. Dropouts and graduates differ, but they’re not the drowned and saved. Some transfer to other universities. Some join the military, straighten out their lives, and come back, powered by the GI Bill, to graduate too late to be counted with their class. Some find secretarial positions to support their kids, and earn BAs and better jobs in middle life. But those cases are exceptional.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The system runs, in part, on its failures. Administrators count on the tuition paid, from borrowed money, by undergraduates who they know will drop out before they use up many services. To provide teaching they exploit instructors still in graduate school, many of whom they know will also drop out and not demand tenure-track jobs. Faculty, once they have found a berth, often become blind to the problems and deaf to the cries of their own indentured students. And even where the will to do better is present, the means are often used for very different ends.

In many universities, finally, the sideshows have taken over the big tent. Competitive sports consume vast amounts of energy and money, some of which could be used to improve conditions for students. It’s hard not to be miserable when watching what pursuit of football glory has done to Rutgers, which has many excellent departments and should be—given the wealth of New Jersey—an East Coast Berkeley or Michigan. The university spends $26.9 million a year subsidizing its athletic programs. Meanwhile faculty salaries have been capped and raises canceled across the board. Desk telephones were recently removed from the offices of the historians. Repairs have been postponed, and classroom buildings, in constant use from early morning until late at night, have become shabbier and shabbier.

When critics argued that it made no sense to support football at the expense of teaching, an official spokesman replied: “The university’s direct support to athletics represents only about 1 percent of the Rutgers budget.” Presumably he counted on readers not to know that in any large organization’s budget, the entire amount of money that is not committed years in advance is no more than 1 or 2 percent—or, to put it more specifically, that athletics has swallowed the money that could otherwise have been used to improve the university’s core activities. Christopher Newfield is not the only sober, informed observer who believes that political elites are deliberately attacking middle-class education.

Perhaps it’s not a crisis. After all, as many observers have pointed out, this is the way we live now, and room remains for exceptions and for hope. Still, the dark hordes of forgotten students who leave the university as Napoleon’s army left Russia, uninspired by their courses, wounded in many cases by what they experience as their own failures, weighed down by their debts, need to be seen and heard. Perhaps some of those who write seriously about universities could stop worrying so much about who gets into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and start worrying about the much larger numbers who don’t make it through Illinois and West Virginia, Vermont and Texas. It would also be instructive to see engaged teachers like Anthony Kronman, author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007), a recent polemic against the corruption of the humanities, concern themselves with the concrete situation in which most American students find themselves. Polemics about the death of the humanities, however eloquent, won’t remedy the inhumanities that thousands of students encounter, predictably, year by year.

Best of all would be for enterprising publishers to find curious writers and have them describe some universities and colleges, in detail, with all their defects. The polemical books, even those that have some substance, end up slinging mud—which, as Huckleberry Finn pointed out to Tom Sawyer, isn’t argument—more often than laying out the evidence. The empirical studies, with a very few exceptions, are deliberately cast in such general terms, and written in such a value- and metaphor-free style, that they won’t reach anyone without a professional interest. Neither sort would give an intelligent outsider—say, a parent or student, a regent or a trustee—a vivid picture of a year’s life and work at a college or university, as it is experienced by all parties; much less a lucid explanation of how finance and pedagogy, bad intentions and good execution shape one another in the academic world.

It must be fun to howl “Read Your Greeks” and denounce evil conspiracies. But public discussion and scrutiny would become much more productive if informed writers captured the texture and flavor of the American university as convincingly as Thomas Ricks, Evan Wright, Elizabeth Samet, and others have done for segments of the military. The novelists discovered this territory long ago. Where are the great journalists? They will find students who manage to do excellent work and many more cases of wasted possibilities, and they might gain some insight into why.

Propaganda and American Foreign Policy: A Historical Overview

2011-11-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

http://kbpublisher.gu-scs.com/kb_file/LSHS-453_Spring_2012_Syllabus.pdf

Memories of the Bush Administration

2011-11-07T09:16:00.000-08:00

November 3, 2011
Memories of the Bush Administration
By ALAN BRINKLEY, New York Times

KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
A Memoir
By Donald Rumsfeld
Illustrated. 815 pp. Sentinel. $36

IN MY TIME
A Personal and Political Memoir
By Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney
Illustrated. 565 pp. Threshold Editions. $35

[JB Note: My March 12, 2003 unanswered email to Secretary of State Colin Powell informing him of my decision to leave the US Foreign Service, as a gesture of opposition to the planned war in Iraq at. See also my "Too Parochial for Empire: The Bush Administration Conquers Washington," TomDispatch (2007)]

The administration of George W. Bush has already produced a remarkable body of contemporary history from a large group of talented journalists and writers — Jane Mayer, Thomas E. Ricks, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Susan Faludi, Seymour M. Hersh, James Mann and many others. But in the last year, several members of the Bush administration have retaliated with books of their own. Among the most significant are former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “Known and Unknown” and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “In My Time,” memoirs by perhaps the two most important figures (other than the president) in the years of terrorism and war. Both books have received mostly negative reviews — largely deserved. Rumsfeld’s book is dense and bloated, although modestly candid. Cheney’s is clearly written (with help from his daughter Liz Cheney), but with the exception of its last chapters, dry, earnest and dull. None of this seems to have had much impact on their sales. Both spent time at the top of the best-seller lists.

Political memoirs are normally unsurprising, but these two books are unusual for their defensiveness and occasional combativeness in the face of the broad popular contempt so many people expressed while Rumsfeld and Cheney were in office. The two men present similar arguments. Both rarely confess to making mistakes, though they often write sharply about others who have. But the most important question that these books raise is the one of their credibility.

That the two memoirs were published in the same year and are in many ways alike should not be surprising. Rumsfeld and Cheney have had a long and intimate relationship stretching back to the Nixon administration and into the present. But even before they met, they followed similar paths into politics and government.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were the sons of middle-class families — Rumsfeld raised in Chicago, Cheney in Nebraska and Wyoming. Both attended public high schools, excelled in athletics and enrolled in prestigious colleges. Rumsfeld attended Princeton, where he was a successful athlete and a popular social figure. Cheney went to Yale, but after two unsuccessful years moved to the University of Wyoming, followed by graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he hoped to get a Ph.D. in political science and become an academic.

Rumsfeld, who is nine years older than Cheney, became a member of Congress in 1962, while Cheney was still struggling through college. But in the early 1970s, their paths crossed, and they soon became close colleagues and friends. The relationship began when Cheney was a young, eager intern looking for a job in the Nixon White House. Rumsfeld — having abandoned a brief career in Congress — was director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. He hired Cheney as an aide — the beginning of a Horatio Alger-like rise — and their partnership shaped each other’s careers for decades afterward. In the aftermath of Watergate, Rumsfeld became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and took Cheney with him as his “stalwart assistant.” When Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defense in 1975, Cheney replaced him as Ford’s chief. Both men were Republicans with conservative leanings. But for many years, during which they often served simultaneously, they seemed to many people to be smart, pragmatic, nonideological young men who fit well into the moderate Ford administration.

When Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, their paths diverged. Cheney was elected to Congress in 1978, where he remained throughout the Reagan administration. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed him secretary of defense, where he became a competent and generally respected figure. Rumsfeld moved into the private sector and remained there for 24 years, while staying active in a wide range of public service committees and commissions.

After the first President Bush left office, Cheney also moved into the private sector, spending time at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington before becoming the C.E.O. of Halliburton, one of the largest oil and construction companies in the world, with connections to militaries in several countries. When George W. Bush chose him as his vice president in 2000, Cheney helped persuade the new president to name Rumsfeld as his secretary of defense. Following the election, there was considerable relief that Cheney and Rumsfeld would be serving the new president, given the doubts that were being voiced about Bush’s capabilities. Even many Democrats were pleased that these competent, experienced figures would play a large role in the new administration.

Shortly before his election in 2000, when the vision of “compassionate conservatism” still seemed plausible, Bush said, “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, ‘We do it this way; so should you.’ ” But after the 9/11 attacks — eight months into his presidency — everything changed. “We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy,” Cheney recalled. “We are dealing here with evil people.”

A group of Republican neoconservatives and other political and government figures quickly gathered not only to respond to the 9/11 attacks but also, as they saw it, to restore the nation’s confidence and ideals. Cheney and Rumsfeld had privately deplored the decline of American power in the Nixon and Ford administrations during the Vietnam War. They saw in 9/11 an opportunity to revive American power and superiority, or as Cheney put it, to “get it right this time.” Much of what happened after the attacks would very likely have occurred no matter who was in charge — the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the building up of intelligence organizations and other changes. But from the start, Cheney and Rumsfeld began pushing for a much wider change, what the president called a “war on terror.”

But what did a “war on terror” mean? For Cheney and many others, and eventually for President Bush, it seemed to mean only one thing — a regime change that would send a message through the Middle East that, as Paul Wolfowitz predicted, would undermine radical regimes and build new ones more consistent with American ideals. Although it was reasonably clear that no political regime had organized the 9/11 attacks, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush came to believe that the regime most in need of destruction was Iraq, even though there was no evidence that the Iraqis had played any role in the terrorist events. By late 2002, the Iraq war was on a fast track, justified by Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. There was resistance from some members of Congress, some United Nations investigators and some individuals in the State Department. But Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were among the most determined people in the administration to promote the assault on Iraq, were not deterred by the fact that the United States had never before launched a pre-emptive war. Their public argument was the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it soon became clear that there were no such weapons.

This discovery caused a political earthquake worldwide. The war now seemed to have no rationale at all, but Cheney and Rumsfeld quickly came up with new ones. Cheney in particular takes no responsibility for this remarkable failure of intelligence. Instead, he argues that the absence of weapons did not make Iraq any less dangerous, and perhaps more. As he often does throughout his book, he argues through others — in this case, David Kay, who worked on the Iraq survey group that was sent to find W.M.D.’s. Cheney quotes him: “I actually think what we learned during the inspections made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than in fact we thought it was even before the war.” Charles Duelfer, another survey group member, insisted (with no visible evidence) that “Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s W.M.D. capability . . . after sanctions were removed.”

Rumsfeld brusquely dismisses his failure to provide sufficient troops to avoid what soon became an out-of-control insurgency that continued for years. He responds in his book, as he did at the time, “Stuff happens,” a phrase he often used when confronted by failures. Among the stuff that happened was the absence of body armor in a highly dangerous country. Soldiers begged for it in vain for months during his occasional visits to Iraq. Rumsfeld’s response was that we had to fight with the Army we had. He is still fighting on the cheap, defending himself with his favorite phrase — “known unknowns” (which is even borrowed for the title of his book). It allows him to claim that it was all but impossible to determine what the military needed. But he also presents himself as realistic enough to understand that Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner and his claim that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” would “haunt his presidency until the day it ended.” And he is candid enough to admit that he should have realized that the war would be a long and difficult one, that democracy in Iraq would be unlikely and that the American administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, had led the country into chaos by recklessly and incompetently disbanding the Iraqi police and military, and the Baath Party government.

The fact of a war of choice was perhaps bad enough. But the Iraq war (and the Afghanistan war as well) were fought not just by weapons and battles. They were also fought by torture. Rumsfeld brushes away the charges of torture in his book by noting either that the Defense Department did not participate, or that the techniques it employed were “legal and humane.” Cheney, however, makes clear from the start that “we would have to work ‘the dark side if you will,’ ” a statement he continues to defend in his book.

Cheney insists that the “enhanced interrogation” that he helped create was not torture. Waterboarding, he has said, was humane and effective because a few lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel said so. Many of their colleagues were aghast, but they were mostly ignored and in some cases dismissed. Even some high-ranking military officers called waterboarding criminal torture. So did Senators John McCain (no stranger to torture) and Lindsey Graham, both Republicans. Cheney passingly mentions other forms of enhanced interrogation in his book, but he does not describe what they were. Nor does he make any mention of the many terrorist suspects who were turned over through “extraordinary rendition” to other countries, where there was no inhibition to using torture.

By 2006, the Bush administration was falling apart. The president’s poll numbers were falling almost by the day. Democrats were on their way to winning majorities in both houses of Congress. Cheney — the most powerful vice president in American history — was becoming an increasingly lonely figure within the White House. Bush decided to make changes — in large part because of the administration’s incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. (In his book, Cheney blames the failure on Kathleen Blanco, the Louisiana governor, for dithering.) Among the dismissed, over Cheney’s strong objections, was Rumsfeld. (The president timidly delegated Cheney to give him the news. Rumsfeld stepped down without complaint.) Cheney, of course, could not be fired as vice president. But he had now become the most toxic figure in the White House.

Cheney’s chief of staff and enforcer, Scooter Libby, was accused of leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. operative, whose husband had challenged the claim that Hussein was building nuclear weapons. Libby was later convicted of perjury. The president commuted his sentence, but as Cheney writes, “I felt strongly that Scooter deserved a pardon, and I broached the subject on numerous occasions with the president.” In the last weeks of Bush’s presidency, he asked again and, when denied, says that the president had made a “grave error”; he told Bush, “you are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.”

That was not the only time Cheney was repudiated. In 2007, Cheney pushed hard to bomb a nuclear reactor in Syria. When the president asked who agreed with the vice president, no one, including the president, raised a hand — a hard defeat for a man whom Karl Rove had long called “management.” “I was a lone voice,” Cheney pathetically writes. (The Israelis successfully bombed the Syrian reactor several months later.) By then, Cheney was one of the most unpopular political figures in America, often ridiculed as “Darth Vader.” The polls showed an approval rating of 13 percent.

Cheney did not take his loss of power easily, and the final chapters of his book are filled with bile and contempt. It was no secret that he had been a critic of Colin Powell through much of Powell’s tenure as secretary of state. He writes that Powell was “not only failing to support the president’s policies” but was “openly disdainful of them.” (Some people in the foundering administration believed that “the president’s policies” were often Cheney’s.) He “was particularly disappointed in the way” Powell “handled policy differences. Time and again I heard that he was opposed to the war in Iraq. . . . But never once in any meeting did I hear him voice objection.” And he was at least equally contemptuous of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She had, he writes, “made concession after concession to the North Koreans and turned a blind eye to their misdeeds.” Cheney consistently complains about what he considered her weaknesses. He also goes after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, claiming that he was often speaking “for himself and not reflecting U.S. policy.” By the end, he even seems to be disappointed with Bush himself — a disappointment that was probably reciprocated. Although Cheney is cautious in his criticism of the president, it seems clear that he thinks Bush had slipped back into what the vice president calls a pre-9/11 mode.

Brent Scowcroft, Gerald Ford’s and George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, said about the man he had worked with in two previous administrations: “Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” What had turned this capable, pragmatic, respected figure into the harsh and belligerent man who seemed toward the end to believe that only he understood the world of his time? Part of it was that he had become “really conservative,” as he told President Bush when he was invited to join the ticket in 2000. Certainly, he was convinced that 9/11 had dramatically changed the world and had radically transformed America’s role in it. And he was disturbed that so many people did not share his views. He also had serious heart problems through much of his life, which intensified during his tenure as vice president, and though he courageously fought to keep going, his poor health may have contributed to what Scowcroft considered his change.

The angry responses to Cheney’s book are evidence of how embattled the Bush White House became in its last years, and how central Cheney’s role was. Colin Powell has accused Cheney of taking “cheap shots” in his book. He has challenged Cheney’s claim that he had forced Powell out of the State Department. Powell himself had long made clear that he would serve only four years, and he charged Cheney with lying. Powell also called Cheney’s statements in the book “the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist.” He added, “I think Dick overshot the runway.” Rice responded to Cheney by describing his book as “utterly misleading” and an “attack on my integrity.” Even Donald Trump, in the aftermath of his preposterous hints that he would run for president, gave an interview in which he accused Cheney of “lying.”

Together, Rumsfeld and Cheney served through many crises and many disasters. It is not surprising that in the turbulent post-9/11 years there would be contention, disappointment, failure, sniping and broken friendships. If they had written candidly about these battles, their books would be of real interest. Instead, both men have stuck to their defensive postures. Cheney said in a television interview that his book would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” For the most part, the explosions were tame. But perhaps the most remarkable explosion was one of Cheney’s own statements. Toward the end of his book, he boldly describes the Iraq war — one of the most disastrous events of recent decades — as a great American triumph. The fiasco that nearly destroyed Bush’s presidency was, according to Cheney, “one of the most significant accomplishments of George Bush’s presidency — the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of a true democracy in the Arab world.” If that statement isn’t an “explosion,” it would be hard to know what is.

Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.”

In Defense of the Humanities - The Case of Steve Jobs: NYT piece by Walter Isaacson

2011-10-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

October 29, 2011
The Genius of Jobs
By WALTER ISAACSON, New York Times

ONE of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.

But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago around his kitchen table, as he did almost every evening with his wife and kids. Someone brought up one of those brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas across a desert, with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time, and you were supposed to figure out how long it would take. Mr. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds, and also how Mr. Gates devoured science books as a vacation pleasure. But then something else occurred to me: Mr. Gates never made the iPod. Instead, he made the Zune.

So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.

He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead ... Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”

Mr. Jobs’s intuition was based not on conventional learning but on experiential wisdom. He also had a lot of imagination and knew how to apply it. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Einstein is, of course, the true exemplar of genius. He had contemporaries who could probably match him in pure intellectual firepower when it came to mathematical and analytic processing. Henri Poincaré, for example, first came up with some of the components of special relativity, and David Hilbert was able to grind out equations for general relativity around the same time Einstein did. But neither had the imaginative genius to make the full creative leap at the core of their theories, namely that there is no such thing as absolute time and that gravity is a warping of the fabric of space-time. (O.K., it’s not that simple, but that’s why he was Einstein and we’re not.)

Einstein had the elusive qualities of genius, which included that intuition and imagination that allowed him to think differently (or, as Mr. Jobs’s ads said, to Think Different.) Although he was not particularly religious, Einstein described this intuitive genius as the ability to read the mind of God. When assessing a theory, he would ask himself, Is this the way that God would design the universe? And he expressed his discomfort with quantum mechanics, which is based on the idea that probability plays a governing role in the universe by declaring that he could not believe God would play dice. (At one physics conference, Niels Bohr was prompted to urge Einstein to quit telling God what to do.)

Both Einstein and Mr. Jobs were very visual thinkers. The road to relativity began when the teenage Einstein kept trying to picture what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. Mr. Jobs spent time almost every afternoon walking around the studio of his brilliant design chief Jony Ive and fingering foam models of the products they were developing.

Mr. Jobs’s genius wasn’t, as even his fanboys admit, in the same quantum orbit as Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity. Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.

In the world of invention and innovation, that means combining an appreciation of the humanities with an understanding of science — connecting artistry to technology, poetry to processors. This was Mr. Jobs’s specialty. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at will. He knew, intuitively, how to create products that pleased, interfaces that were friendly, and marketing messages that were enticing.

In the annals of ingenuity, new ideas are only part of the equation. Genius requires execution. When others produced boxy computers with intimidating interfaces that confronted users with unfriendly green prompts that said things like “C:\>,” Mr. Jobs saw there was a market for an interface like a sunny playroom. Hence, the Macintosh. Sure, Xerox came up with the graphical desktop metaphor, but the personal computer it built was a flop and it did not spark the home computer revolution. Between conception and creation, T. S. Eliot observed, there falls the shadow.

In some ways, Mr. Jobs’s ingenuity reminds me of that of Benjamin Franklin, one of my other biography subjects. Among the founders, Franklin was not the most profound thinker — that distinction goes to Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton. But he was ingenious.

This depended, in part, on his ability to intuit the relationships between different things. When he invented the battery, he experimented with it to produce sparks that he and his friends used to kill a turkey for their end of season feast. In his journal, he recorded all the similarities between such sparks and lightning during a thunderstorm, then declared “Let the experiment be made.” So he flew a kite in the rain, drew electricity from the heavens, and ended up inventing the lightning rod. Like Mr. Jobs, Franklin enjoyed the concept of applied creativity — taking clever ideas and smart designs and applying them to useful devices.

China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.

Walter Isaacson is the author of “Steve Jobs.” [and the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors]

Public Diplomacy: Suggested US-Israel conference

2011-10-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

As the growing tension between the U.S. and Israel never ceases to end, despite hopeful intervals on the healing of the relationship, may I suggest that a think-tank with a public-diplomacy focus organize a symposium on the slightly provocative (perhaps politically incorrect, but I hope that would create an "honest" intellectual buzz) topic:

"What's Israel Done for (to?) the United States?"

(Of course, there could be also be a session on "What's the United States Done for (to?) Israel.")

The discussion on this topic would, assuredly, bring the attention of the media -- and, perhaps, the public -- in both countries, leading, let us hope, to a more honest, constructive relation between the two countries.

Beware of Mainland China's Fearsome Public Diplomacy

2011-10-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

Chinese Communist Film Premiere at Lincoln Center a Big Flop - Jenny Yang, Epoch Times

The Chinese communist regime’s United Front soft-power propaganda war aimed at shaping world opinion through culture, film, and media, has just fired an embarrassing dud, with not a single audience member showing up at the 2011 China Movie Culture Week opening night at New York’s Lincoln Center.

The 2011 China Movie Culture Week, hosted by China’s Ministry of Culture, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television, and Columbia University, encountered an embarrassment--no one showed up at its Oct. 17 premiere of the movie “Founding of a Republic,” not even anyone from the hosting organizations.

The flop has become a joke on international Chinese media.

Taiwan’s Want Daily said, although the communist regime spent a large amount of money promoting the 2011 China Film Culture Week in New York, the first movie, “Founding of a Republic,” playing at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, had no audience showing up, so the opening banquet there was canceled and changed to the night of Oct. 18 at Columbia University Auditorium.

A China-U.S. Scholar Seminar on Oct. 18 was also canceled. The topic of the seminar was on the development of the Chinese film industry and its contribution to world film culture. This cancellation was not announced either.

State controlled media People.com.cn quoted reports from Guangming Daily, which didn’t mention the premiere flop at all. It only said the 2011 China Movie Culture Week started on Oct. 17, and that its aim was to let Americans enjoy a rich retreat of authentic Chinese culture through excellent movies made in China in recent years.

Patriotic Communist Propaganda

“Founding of a Republic” was financed by the Chinese communist party’s (CCP) largest state owned film company, China Film Corporation. The movie is a patriotic propaganda piece set in Beijing between 1945 and 1949, glorifying the communist takeover of China.

When the movie was released in mainland China in 2009, it received many negative comments from netizens there. They found it most ironic that the regime had utilized so many “foreigners,” overseas Chinese actors, in this patriotic film. Most celebrity figures of China’s entertainment industry have immigrated to foreign countries, such as the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Singapore.

One netizen said it was hilarious to have people who abandoned Chinese nationality educate Chinese people on patriotism.

Another said it demonstrated the “failure of 60 years of patriotism,” and was a “huge irony!”

Some went so far as saying the film “shames modern Chinese movies.”