Avuncular American

Women In Power - Over There, Underrepresented

NOTE: This article appears in Together Magazine, a Brussels bimonthly circulated among EU institutions.  This is the first "Gerald's Gaze" (nod to Stephen King) opinion column for Together.  In an issue devoted to the theme of Women in Power, the piece highlights the paucity of power for women in American politics, and how that may change in the wake of Barack Obama’s Presidential victory.

----------------------------------------

A mini-quiz to begin: Who was the first female US Presidential candidate?

a. Eleanor Roosevelt
b. Hillary Clinton
c. Geraldine Ferraro
d. Shirley Chisholm
e. None of the above

Attention - it’s actually a trick question. Most people know that Hillary Clinton was the first woman to run for President. Except she wasn’t. In fact, the mostly forgotten Victoria Woodhull (from as far back as 1872) takes that honor - her running mate, black anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass, is better remembered. Appropriately enough, they were candidates for the Equal Rights Party.

“You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” - the 1960s vintage ‘Virginia Slims’ cigarette adverts (not Fatboy Slim’s album) - have provided cliched headlines for thousands of articles on the progress of women’s rights during the past 40 years. In the American political battleground, ‘Women in Power’ remains a largely underachieved goal, with notable exceptions. More accurately, we might say ‘Women For Power’, as their vote is increasingly crucial to winning elective office for candidates of either sex.

LONG TIME COMING
It wasn’t until the 20th century that women were enfranchised, let alone taken seriously enough to campaign in the mainstream parties. In the Democratic Party, Shirley Chisholm, the first black Congresswoman, ran unsuccessfully for President in 1972. In 1984 another Democrat, Geraldine Ferraro, became the first woman Vice Presidential nominee of a major party, but met the same fate as Republican Sarah Palin in 2008.

So Hillary Clinton, though she got further than other American women, didn’t invent female Presidential politics. In fact, the US comes out rather poorly in some metrics: Rwanda is number one in elected women, while Belgium is number eight. The US ranks a lowly 57 in terms of female members of parliamentary bodies (for women in elective office, it is 70th in the world). Women have fared somewhat better in the US Senate and states, however - there are 16 women out of 100 senators, and women are governors in 11 of the 50 states.

In the Presidential succession lineup, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House of Representatives comes after the Vice President. Pelosi wields considerable legislative power, which was strengthened in the recent elections. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also highly placed in the succession order, as was her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice.

Rice wasn’t the first female Secretary of State; Madeleine Albright was, a decade earlier. And Clinton, who during husband Bill’s tenure preferred a more overtly political role to the honorific duties of ‘First Lady’, was not the first Presidential wife to dabble in matters of state. Edith Wilson was catapulted into an unofficial ‘secret Presidency’ when her husband Woodrow suffered a stroke after WW I, and Eleanor Roosevelt survived her husband Franklin to lead the US delegation at the 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

THE FEMALE FACTOR
So, we’ve established that American women have been politically active for some time, even before they won the right to vote in 1920, but what has it got them? Under-representation, for one thing: only 25 per cent of US elective office holders are women, though they comprise 52 per cent of the population, and there’s also the notion - often misconstrued - that there is a ‘women’s vote’, that is, they vote monolithically, and that women vote for women.

The 2008 campaign was instructive: though most attention had been on Hillary Clinton’s prospects, she had barely lost the Democratic Party nomination before the Republican Party came up with their own woman - Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. John McCain’s choice of Palin as running mate was both a bold move to corral the conservative base and a blatant bid for ‘the women’s vote’. All manner of supposedly disappointed ‘Clinton women’ were trotted out to testify how they were now going to vote Republican.

And we all know how it ended - despite the absence of Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket and Sarah Palin’s seeming omnipresence on the Republican side, Barack Obama carried the vote of women by a wide margin. It may be that their vote was decisive - for years, millions more women have voted than men, well beyond their numerical superiority in the population. In the end, it was their preference, especially among younger and unmarried women, for Obama’s stand on issues - and not gender solidarity - that swayed women in 2008.

IT’S THE POLICY, STUPID
Beyond elections, women in the United States struggle to gain influence and power relative to their numbers. It’s mostly an uphill battle, but some sectors stand out. Women now make up 14 per cent of the US Army, and 21 have attained the rank of general. In the State Department, Hillary Clinton presides over a diplomatic corps that includes more than 50 women of ambassadorial rank.

Barack Obama didn’t win the Presidency by campaigning as the African-American or mixed-race candidate. In fact, he won by transcending racial pigeonholing. Obama’s victory, Hillary Clinton’s close-run thing, and Sarah Palin’s flop should show American women that - more than race or gender - it’s the policy, stupid. 'You’ve Got a Long Way to Go, Baby' - but at least the route to power for American women is no longer the ‘Road to Nowhere’.

---------------------------------------
##

We Are Scandalized - Scandalized!

The Great American Sport of Witch Hunting

For American expats suffering bouts of insomnia, the 10:00 PM EST live feed of CNN's "AC360" (3:00 AM CET) is sometimes a way of checking the pulse in the "old country" (well, MY old country, in the sense of land of my birth).  Years ago, French "Canal +" TV used to rebroadcast the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather early the following morning, nicely shorn of commercials to a compact 20 minutes.  Like the Anderson Cooper show, it was a way of seeing what Americans were watching.

These days, that would be THE AIG BONUS SCANDAL.  For those who have been away from their news sources, you'd probably have to have been in the outer reaches of the Gobi Desert not to have heard of the millions distributed to the employees of the company that has received billions in bailout money for problem derivative debt in the trillions.

In "School For Scandal: The Larger Meaning of the Sordid Little Tale" in this month's Harper's, Laura Kipnis marvels at our capacity to continue to be shocked - shocked! - at the foibles of the high, the mighty, the fast, and the loose.  Kipnis, who is preparing publication of her own book "How To Become A Scandal," reviews two new books on the subject, the more interesting of which is entitled "The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession In America" by Susan Wise Bauer.

Unless I'm missing something, I'm unaware of a sexual angle in the AIG BONUS SCANDAL or for that matter in the BERNARD MADOFF SCANDAL.  No matter.  Laura Kipnis wants to tell us that we're down in the weeds (or is it the gutter?), and need to look up:

We're looking for the life raft that would save us, the crucial missing piece of knowledge - something that would change the outcome.  Clearly we're looking in the wrong place: the truths we need are hidden in plain sight; the depredations of power are no secret.  How much anger toward leaders and elites gets played out around their minor personal missteps, how much sense of social injury; yet how little of it is directed at the moral failures and inequities that actually matter.

What actually matters is apparently what was on President Obama's mind yesterday, at the town hall meeting in Costa Mesa California that AC360 juxtaposed with its own "town hall" in a Detroit area bar.

The President:

But these bonuses, outrageous as they are, are a symptom of a much larger problem. And that is the system and culture that made them possible – a culture where people made enormous sums for taking irresponsible risks that have now put the whole economy at risk. So we are going to do everything we can to deal with these specific bonuses. But what’s just as important is that we make sure we don’t find ourselves in this situation again, where taxpayers are on the hook for losses in bad times and all the wealth generated in good times goes to those at the very top.

"The system and culture that made them possible," as the President said, is still very much present, despite all the sputtering in Congress.

Gail Collins in today's New York Times ("The Grievance Committee"), who can be counted on to get to the sardonic root of things, is "totally angry at everybody in Congress for trying to pretend that they’re angrier than I am."  She thinks she's figured out where the President is on this:

Sure he keeps saying he’s mad. But you can tell that he secretly thinks it’s crazy to obsess about $165 million in bonuses in a company that’s still got $1.6 trillion in toxic assets to unravel.

I think Collins/Obama are right.  And I think CNN got it way wrong, yesterday, trying to out-populist and out-town meeting the Prez, and trying to link his White House and his party to some sort of responsibility for allowing the (fat) cats to escape the bag.  He's The Solution, not The Problem - let's keep that straight.  He's Roosevelt, and we just said goodbye to Herbert Dubya Hoover.

But TV news, whether CNN or Fox, likes to rub its hands in glee over scandals of its own devising.  Human nature never changes.  Read this, from my current bedtime reading:

To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding.  How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause!  To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero worship, if the circumstances are favorable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they should be unfavorable, of persecuting a scapegoat.

The excerpt is from Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, which is as old as I am but makes for great reading (maybe that's what caused my insomnia: director Ken Russell did justice to this horribly true tale in his extravagant 1971 epic The Devils).

Hero to... scapegoat.  Such was the fate of Father Grandier, popular "virtuoso orator" in Huxley's words, who threatened  vested interests but eventually fell afoul of public opinion.  He was burned at the stake.

CNN, which should know better, should be wary of any tendency to want to contribute to the Rush Limbaugh "I want him to fail" movement opposing Barack Obama's attempts to steer the ship of state away from its current very dangerous waters.  Supertankers, we are told, take a long time to change course.  Inauguration Day was all of 58 days ago.

Üç maymun - Three Monkeys

Just like the Chinese/Japanese exhortation to "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil," Three Monkeys (poster, official site) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan offers no clear explanation of the underlying meaning.  Is it just good sense to mind your own business, or is there a danger of ignoring evil and being complicit?  Watching this tense non-thriller, another maxim comes to mind: be careful what you ask for.

Here's what the official site says:

A family dislocated when small failings blow up into extravagant lies battles against the odds to stay together by covering up the truth... In order to avoid hardship and responsibilities that would otherwise be impossible to endure, the family chooses to ignore the truth, not to see, hear or talk about it. But does playing “Three Monkeys” invalidate the truth of its existence?

The setting is contemporary Istanbul; the only calendar marker I could spot was a background TV newscast proclaiming the electoral victory of the ruling (moderate) Islamist AKP party.  Politician "Servet," we learn, is on the losing side, or in any case does not win in his circumscription.  But that is perhaps the least of his worries.  He has to deal with the matter of a late-night car accident on a deserted country road.  Enter the "dislocated family" - but I won't tell you any more of the story line.

I missed the writer/director's 2006 film Climates, but Kevin Crust's review in the Los Angeles Times captures the essence of the Ceylan style:

The languid tone of the film is enhanced by the dawdling camera as it captures both serene vistas and the near-microscopic focus on character. Quiet moments are further etched with emotion by a finely tuned sound design in which the sizzle of a cigarette sounds like the menacing hiss of a rattlesnake.

Wide Bosphorus vistas combined with "microscopic focus" on the three main characters, a dominant sepia-gray tone that enhances storm clouds and puts that "finely tuned sound design" into high relief - such are the pleasures of Three Monkeys.  A note on that sound design: the Sunday-morning sneak preview in Brussels by the group "Cinefemme" was the perfect setting for true appreciation of this film.  A pin could have been heard, but none were dropped.  So much the better to "feel" the nighttime sounds of Istanbul: a far-off muezzin calling the faithful to prayer; a street cat and his plaintive meow; approaching rain on a rooftop terrace.

Though I missed Climates, I did see Uzak (Distant) when it was released in Brussels in 2004.  Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films should probably be required viewing for those whose cinematic references for Turkey are mired in Midnight Express (1978).  The country has moved on, and AKP or no, Ceylan shows a complex, sophisticated, and secular society where - I know it from reliable sources - the Istanbul Rotary Club has been open to women members long before clubs in... Belgium.

The 2008 Cannes Film Festival awarded Ceylan's Three Monkeys its Best Director prize.  It is, as Le Monde put it, "du grand cinéma."

Blind Bloviators: Comedic CNBC + MoJo Hits WSJ

If you haven't seen the Daily Show's Jon Stewart giving it good to CNBC "financial commentator" (that's a bit like calling Bernie Madoff a "banker") Jim Cramer, then here is the extended version (unexpurgated).  It's full of quotable stuff, but my favorite is Cramer's explanation of why CNBC has so much junk financial talk on tape, providing Daily Show editors with a gold mine: "We've got 17 hours of live TV to do" daily.

To which Stewart replies, "Maybe you should cut down on that..."  Which goes to the heart of the problem of TV "news" or, more accurately, infotainment.  CNBC has to say something during those 17 hours of live (presumably they are not better informed during the remaining 7 hours of taped material).  And that's just one network.  Can you imagine the total amount of drivel that America's hundreds of cable channels must churn out daily?

It used to be "the news," as in "did you see the news last night?"  There was CBS in pride of place, followed in order of reputation by NBC and ABC.  Only later did PBS come along.

Less, in the case of TV news, was more: in the sixties and seventies, Americans getting their information from one of the networks could count on a rich mix of reports from foreign correspondents, in-depth investigative reporting, and the occasional prime-time documentary.  Now you have to fork out upwards of $10 to see "Why We Fight" or "SiCKO" at the local multiplex, when the networks used to do stuff almost as good, and all you had to do was watch their commercials from the comfort of your sofa.

And don't get me started on the disappearance of American correspondents from points beyond the continental shelf.

Enter MoJo - Mother Jones, which is making a name for itself for the quality of its investigative reporting - to take on the print media.  Actually, MoJo beat the Daily Show by a couple of months in its castigation of the princes of print financial reporting.  In "Buying the Bull: How could 9,000 business reporters blow the biggest story of their beat?" former WSJ reporter Dean Starkman's ire is no less heartfelt than Jon Stewart's.  But he goes deeper:

but it wasn't just the media abdicating their watchdog role: Just as financial news outlets were weakening, regulators were also abandoning the field, leaving business reporters starved of the investigative leads they rely on. Back in the 1980s, a great deal of tough Wall Street coverage was driven by the aggressive work of prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec). But then came the Clinton-era push toward deregulation that reached its extremes during the Bush administration as the federal government unceremoniously pulled the finance cops off the beat. For a time, Eliot Spitzer filled the void with his aggressive prosecution of Wall Street misdeeds, but for the most part, covering financial corruption without regulators was like trying to clap with one hand.

Starkman then provides some amazing examples of just how lax the Bush Administration had gotten in its fiduciary responsibilities: "Since 2002 the ftc has brought no major consumer lending cases. Zero. The last such case brought by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, against Providian National Bank, came in 2000."  That's it.  No wonder financial journalists weren't getting the leads. He quotes Jonathan Weil, who helped break the Enron story, who wrote in the waning days of the Bush era:

"Is there anybody left in the government with a pulse? Where's the yellow police tape? How about a cease-and-desist order to prevent document destruction? Can anyone give me a good reason why Lehman offices shouldn't be treated as a crime scene now?"

As Weil, Starkman, and Jon Stewart know, Bernard Madoff isn't the only perp.  But the perps were aided and abetted by see-no-evil "regulators" and "financial reporters."

Caribbean: Trouble On That Other Southern Border

Americans' attention might be drawn to trouble brewing South of the Border, with recent discussion of beefing up the US-Mexican border patrols in light of drug violence.  Here in Europe, however, we've been shown almost daily footage of violent protests in the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, two relatively large islands in the Caribbean - "America's third border."  And anyway, the trouble is, as they say, franco-francaise and therefore none of the US's business.

According to the latest AFP dispatches, the situation appears to be settling down after this winter of discontent. These French overseas departments, known by the old Crusader term of Outremer that was first applied to the Holy Land, are remnants of a French Caribbean presence that started to unravel with the revolution in Haiti two centuries ago.

The 1969 Pontecorvo film “Burn!” or “Queimada” showed an ambiguous figure played by Marlon Brando encouraging and then repressing a fictional Caribbean island slave revolt against white foreign masters. The French Antilles are of course full-fledged departments whose citizens elect representatives to parliament in Paris, and for that matter, to the European Parliament in Strasbourg/Brussels. But the language - and tactics - employed in recent weeks were more reminiscent of “Burn!” than similar protests over the cost of living in, say, suburban Lille.

One aspect of the problem is the clear color difference between on one hand the emissaries of Paris, sometimes sitting with local business leaders, facing elected local officials and people on the street, the overwhelming majority of whom are Afro-Caribbeans. Protesters used the term “beke” to describe the white landowning business community, and what might elsewhere have been simply marches of the “have-nots” had a distinct undercurrent of racial remonstration.

This class/racial social structure has been around since slaves were black and masters were white. And the economies of Guadeloupe and Martinique, though no longer completely based on sugar cane, are nevertheless dependent on mercantile trading houses that tend to be in the hands of white families, described in the 1972 classic “West Indian Societies” by David Lowenthal, but pretty much unchanged in subsequent decades. Hence the racial undertones.

“Independence” wasn’t heard much during the protests - have the French overseas citizens of the “DOM” given up on independence, which carries its own risks (see Haiti, Madagascar)? Are there similarities to attitudes in the American Caribbean “commonwealth” of Puerto Rico, where the talk now is not of independence but increased representation?

Note: A version of this post first appeared in "Errant European"

Stamp Image: Association Frontenac-Ameriques

Diplomat Saves Damsel In Distress: A Career Footnote

This week, I'm cross-posting two entries in the series that The Hegemonist is running, "Foreign Service Interviews."  As I mentioned in Installment One, I urge you to check out TH, which is a great blog by a serving FS Officer who recently suspended blogging - and has thankfully resumed - when the State Department announced what appeared to be impossible pre-clearance guidelines for what is a rather instant medium.

Here, I address the question, "Please share your best FS story or greatest FS achievement."  Please note: I've done many other - mostly routine - jobs in the course of my Foreign Service career.  But in terms of story value, this one beats out the other "achievements."

-----------------------------------

They always say that consular officers have the best stories, and in my own experience, several forays into the consular world confirm that. Especially if human relations are high on your priority list. My "proudest achievement" dates back to the early '80s, when as Deputy Principal Officer I was also Consul in Alexandria, Egypt. Alas, the Consulate General is no more, a victim of the early '90s James Baker sacrifice of a slew of constituent posts in key regions of the world to make way for new US embassies in the former Soviet Republics. At least there's still a cultural center. But I digress.

A letter arrived at my office, addressed to the US Embassy in Cairo but with a return address in Alexandria. The writer, an American citizen in Alexandria, had no idea there was a US Consulate in her city. At the time, it was the second largest city in Africa, Cairo being the first. And why should she know? She was a young mother with several little boys, and she was sequestered in an apartment in a foreign city.

Here's the back story: my "Amcit" - let's call her "Lisa al-Siyasi" - had met a charming Saudi student at college in the States, gotten married, and had several children. Things hadn't worked out - he was rich, she wasn't, but there were probably more important incompatibilities - and they got divorced. Mr. al-Siyasi returned to Saudi Arabia, and sometimes vacationed at his parents' penthouse on the Mediterranean in Alexandria. Some years later, he cajoled Lisa into a summertime visit for her and the kids to the exotic Middle East. She took up his invitation for what in his mind was a one-way trip back to the bosom of his family.

That's about as much as I learned from Lisa's letter, plus this: she desperately wanted to escape. But she had no money, and her ex-husband kept her and the kids under virtual house arrest.

The only thing I could think of was to write her a letter on Consulate stationery, "convoking" her to the US Consulate. The ruse worked: an appointment was made, and her ex-husband even brought her to my office. Luckily, while he was busy looking up information in the Commercial section, Lisa and I had a few minutes to discuss her situation and get crucial information on her status and her family back in the States. Visit over, she was returned to her gilded cage.

Working with the State Department and the Embassy in Cairo, we established contact with Lisa's family in the States. They really didn't have much money, but they were able to scrape together enough funds to buy tickets for Lisa and her boys to return home. But how to arrange the "great escape?"

Mr. al-Siyasi and his rich-Saudi-playboy lifestyle was the key. Lisa and I were able to talk on the phone (a working phone in Egypt in those days was a rarity) while Mr. al-S. was sleeping well into lunchtime, working off his late nights and hard-partying. We cooked up a plan that centered on his being out of commission during the morning hours.

With key assistance from the Levantine manager of the local TWA office, and from an Alexandrian taxi service that we knew well, we procured tickets and arranged for an early morning pickup. Lisa and the boys were able to slip out of the apartment and were whisked off to Cairo while Mr. al-S. got his beauty sleep.

The part of the plan that caused us the most heartburn was the airline schedule: flights from Cairo to Europe and beyond had already left by the time our taxi man delivered Lisa and family to the airport hotel. Her tickets - issued under a variation of the name "al-Siyasi" - were for a flight leaving Cairo the next morning. We'd just have to sweat it out for another 24 hours.

In the meantime, back in Alexandria, Mr. al-S. woke up around noon to find his ex-wife and children gone. I was not surprised, therefore, to find him at the Consulate soon thereafter. I took the precaution of asking one of the Consulate's US Marine Security Guards to hang out in my office in civvies, but with a nightstick handy in case things got physical.

Whether it was the Marine's presence, or Saudi stoicism, I'll never know, but the meeting passed calmly enough. I feigned ignorance of Lisa's whereabouts, and he went off. But I knew that wasn't the end of the story.

Next day, Cairo airport. Lisa and boys show up at the TWA counter, and Mr. al-Siyasi is there. And he starts shouting in Arabic, "this woman is stealing my children!" to the gathering crowd. Lisa, who had feared this very outcome, was mortified.

Now, readers in the US Embassy circuit will recognize the term "expediter," those indispensable fixers who shepherd travelers through the complexities of customs, immigration, and security with minimal fuss and delay. We had arranged for such a man to help Lisa and the boys at the airport that day. But this man was not your garden-variety expediter. He was a retired Egyptian Army brigadier general, and his response to the shouting Mr. al-Siyasi?

"This Saudi is threatening this American lady," he told the Egyptian security guards present. I should note that in Egypt - home of the Pyramids, center of Arabic-language culture - there is a certain resentment of wealthy Gulf Arabs - but most especially Saudis - who flaunt their riches and their lack of culture and treat Egyptians like poor cousins, or much worse.

"This Saudi..." - well, that was more than sufficient to trigger the appropriate response, and as the sputtering Saudi was being dragged away, Lisa and boys were able to continue their check-in and their trip to freedom.

So ends my story, which remains my proudest achievement, and was accomplished in the years before US adoption of the Hague Abduction Convention, which might have complicated things. And we all had Mr. al-Siyasi to thank for having abducted his ex-wife and kids in a country where Saudis are loathed. It's not always as "easy" for Americans in similar situations.

--------------------------------

Note: This anecdote also illustrates another career essential, "job satisfaction."

Can the United States Be a "Normal" Country?

This week, I'm cross-posting two entries in the series that The Hegemonist is running, "Foreign Service Interviews."  I urge you to check out TH, which is a great blog by a serving FS Officer who recently suspended blogging - and has thankfully resumed - when the State Department announced what appeared to be impossible pre-clearance guidelines for what is a rather instant medium.

Here is my answer to TH's question, "What is the biggest foreign policy challenge the U.S. faces?"  I will post separately the other part of the interview.

----------------------------

Others will say it's brokering a Middle East Peace, solving climate change and resolving energy dependence, or defeating obscurantist terrorist groups. All these are important, vitally so. But I say the biggest challenge is self-perception. Is the United States "the indispensable nation" as Madeleine Albright (and President Clinton) liked to say, or the Reagan/Winthrop "shining city on the hill?"

While I think it's good to aspire to shining images and to try to be as indispensable as possible, what I think the U.S. needs is a dose of humility. Not the kind that George W. Bush preached and didn't practice: "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us; if we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us," said he during the 2000 campaign. Sounded like Field of Dreams.

More like Field of Nightmares, but we're rid of him, if not his legacy. So if he gave humility a bad rep, how can we describe what is a worthy stance for a great country suffering from a case of post-Bush reality?

How about "normal country?" Hey U.S. - be normal! Normal countries have ups and downs, and we're dealing with the downs right now. But like manic-depressives, we should be wary of going from a self-perception of shining indispensability to morose has-been-ness in the space of a couple of months.

Other countries will still call for "US Leadership," and we should be happy to oblige, as long as it's not just a more polite version of "with us or against us." You can lead by example, and probably should. There's nothing worse than "do as I say..."

From my days at NATO in the mid-nineties (and it really hasn't changed), I knew that everyone knows that the US was the first among consensual equals. We pay the most into the Alliance, and our defense establishment dwarfs all the others combined. But it was bad form to ever remind Allies of that. It was a given. I remember a Big Four (US, UK, France, Germany) ambassador reminding a smaller country's ambassador of their relatively meager contribution to the Alliance's budgets. Boy did that go over badly. No need to rub things in, or to play "my GDP, my population" is bigger than...

So a little dose of normality - or accepting that the US, while big, rich, and powerful, does not have all the solutions - is a bigger challenge than might seem evident. It means admitting that others might have better approaches, for example. Learning from other countries' experience in everything from micro-finance (how about a Grameen Bank approach to sub-prime repossessions in Florida?) to alternative energy (Germany and Denmark could teach us a thing or two about wind power).

Normalcy - hasn't sounded good since Warren Harding mangled the word "normality" - but it might be a way for the U.S. to navigate what is a very abnormal situation in the world.

----------------------------------

P.S. To readers whose second (or n^th) language is English: please don't use the term "normalcy," though it is in Webster's Dictionary.  You'll sound like Warren Harding, who, until George W. Bush usurped his place, had always ranked as the worst ever American President.

Israel-US: Agrément Denied, Freeman Chas-tised

Another "I-forgot-to-post-it-note"

 Photo: "Do not forget to live," © Alexey Ivanov, iStockphoto

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel.  I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel.  It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so.  This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

Ambassador (ret'd) Chas Freeman, on his short-lived nomination to head the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC)

The ways of diplomacy are ancient and mysterious indeed:

...formal application for agrément, or consent, is made by the envoy being replaced. Then the new ambassador is sent forth with a letter of credence addressed by his head of state to the head of the host state to introduce the ambassador as his or her representative. In most major capitals a copy of credentials is now first...

Britannica.com, Extract from "Letter of credence (diplomacy)"

Diplomats know that host nations can sometimes reject the ambassadors who are proposed by foreign capitals.  Usually this takes place out of the limelight, like the story (apocryphal or not, I do not know) about the highly qualified prospective young female ambassador - a respected and hard-charging regional affairs expert - proposed to a Central American junta in the late Seventies.  The colonels' answer to Washington?  "Can't you just send us another middle-aged white male, like we're used to dealing with?"

The late great Arabist Hume Horan, probably the best-qualified representative to Saudi Arabia, was unceremoniously expelled - in part because he probably knew the country too well.  Chas Freeman - himself a former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia - might now be suffering from the same fate.  He knows the Middle East too well - so much so that he questions the underpinnings of the sacrosanct Israel-US "special relationship."

But the operative terms in matters of agrément are "foreign" and "nation."  Not domestic political action committee or PAC, as in AIPAC's objection to Freeman for his questioning - as opposed to rote acceptance of - the Israeli tail wagging the American dog.

It is the Obama NIC's loss: Freeman appears to be a diplomat of uncanny ability.  Just read his masterful "Impressions of Arabia" from November 2007 for his insights into the troubled region.  His view of AIPAC/Israeli conniving to remove him: "Israel is driving itself toward a cliff."  There is an example of the kind of "tough love" that we were supposed to be hearing towards our MNNA (major non-NATO ally) from the new administration.

I can almost imagine the AIPAC lobbyists: "Can't you just appoint...?"  Remember, Wag The Dog ends badly.

Tulpan

As I write this, Alexander Borodin's "In The Steppes of Central Asia" is playing in the background.  This is not quite the soundtrack of Tulpan, Sergei Dvortsevoy's latest film from his native Kazakhstan (though he now lives in Moscow).  He is an ethnic Russian, a minority that represents 30% of the Kazakh population and whose language is still the most widely spoken.  No, Borodin's majestic orchestral portrait might be a touch out of place in this film where the most memorable tunes are some Kazakh pastoral folk songs and Boney M.'s "By The Rivers of Babylon."  I defy you to leave the cinema without that great reggae beat reverberating in your brain.  When you see Tulpan, you'll appreciate just how incongruous and yet strangely appropriate that track is in the trackless steppe.

Maybe that's the best frame of mind in which to approach this film: there is understated humor, little dialogue, and vistas that are more desolate than majestic.  Other recent films that portray nomadic life in yurts (Tuya's Marriage and Cave of the Yellow Dog come to mind) show a rather more romantic and richly pastoral view of the steppe.  Here it's mainly dust, and the sheep need to get to greener pastures - or else.

But the main preoccupation is getting the lead character Asa hooked up with Tulpan, the mysterious maid in the neighboring yurt.  "Cherchez la femme," they might say in Kazakhstan - and they do (I have that on highest authority from the family Kazakh expert, my son, who spent several months there and was intrigued to hear a stream of Russian or Kazakh interspersed with French expressions like "cherchez la femme").

The original sense of "chercher femme" is to get married, and Asa's Kazakh dream - wife, yurt, camel, sheep - is sketched out on the collar flap of his Russian naval uniform.  Though we're ostensibly in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, the ties between the new republic and Mother Russia obviously go beyond use of the lingua franca.  Asa has just been demobbed, and try as he might, his stories of maritime adventure don't seem to impress Tulpan and her parents.

Director Sergei Dvortsevoy has a solid record of achievement in the world of documentary film making, though this is his first feature film. His documentarian experience shows in the detail of nomadic life, and there are little inside jokes on his past as a radio/aviation engineer - the nomad kid who is always glued to his transistor radio, and relays the news that he has memorized to his family.

Dvortsevoy was interviewed in a Russian journal a few years ago on his philosophy of film making, before his breakout from documentary films, here translated for the Institute of Documentary Film (IDF)

I always try to find some poetry in everyday life, something metaphysical. When I observe some social phenomenon and contemplate it, I find a deeper thought, an image... All you have to do is find a way of rendering it. You need to observe it carefully. I like to watch, to observe life. And that is the essential root. If you love life, you will see a lot, you just need to care for it. The trouble is that most people simply don’t like reality. They find it sordid, uninteresting, and so they run away from it. They’re afraid of it. On the contrary, I like reality, I love it. I’m just fond of life.

You only have to look at the poster above to see what he means by metaphysical images in everyday life.  If you too are fond of life, check out Tulpan.  And be ready for Boney M. in the Steppes of Central Asia.

Use Ladder, Not Shovel, To Exit Hole

Photo: "Do not forget to live," © Alexey Ivanov, iStockphoto

"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."

Albert Einstein

That wonderful quote, and others from luminaries like Churchill and Gandhi, are on an interesting website, RaisingAwareness.org.

I thought of it this morning while reading Bob Herbert's "Reviving The Dream" in the New York Times on the increasingly rabid right wing reaction - as in reactionary - to the Obama Administration's efforts to fix the problems that the Bush Administration got the world into.  Mr. Herbert:

The right-wingers were crafty: You smother the dream by crippling the programs that support it, by starving the government of money to pay for them, by funneling the government’s revenues to the rich through tax cuts and other benefits, by looting the government the way gangsters loot legitimate businesses and then pleading poverty when it comes time to fund the services required by the people.

The dream he's talking about is of course the American one, the idea that normal people, working honestly, could make a decent living.  Honest. Decent. Normal.  It seems so far away, like a Norman Rockwell painting.  Like an "I like Ike" button.

So, back to Einstein: "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."  Trust the people who dug us this hole to propose solutions that would make it deeper.  Obama, the man with the ladder, is trying his best to pull us out of it.

So I end my first "I forgot to post it" note, hence the nice picture above.  This week I'll be rummaging through my notes and doing a bunch of quick posts.  So you'll see Alexey Ivanov's photo every so often.