Avuncular American

Citizen's Arrest!

Today I longed for the America of Mayberry NC, that imaginary Sixties town where even as dumb a citizen as Gomer Pyle could shout "Citizen's Arrest!" at law breakers and hope that justice would be served.  Even though the Andy Griffith Show is long over, apparently the notion of citizens reporting traffic violations continues in Rockville, Maryland, a Washington D.C. suburb where we once lived.   There, citizens - hopefully public-spirited and not mean-spirited - can W.R.I.T.E. (Witness Report in Traffic Enforcement) their local police, filling out an online form, which covers everything from excessive speed to reckless driving.

Reckless driving - I guess that's what you might call my encounter this morning while walking back home from the bakery.  On a busy two-lane Brussels street, I chose my crossing point judiciously.  A "zebra" crossing, where, in Belgium, the simple placement of a foot from sidewalk to pavement is supposed to result in traffic coming to a halt to let the pedestrian cross.  In this case, it was even better: a city bus had stopped to pick up passengers immediately before the crosswalk.  I needn't even look left - the bus was in that lane - and the car in the other lane was slowing down.

But skeptic that I am, I did look left, and lo and behold, a big black 4 X 4 with two testosterone-laden young men out to prove that they can pass a stopped bus - a violation - and run down (almost) a pedestrian in a crosswalk - another violation - is bearing down on me.   Luckily, they weren't willfully homicidal, and they did stop at the sight of a bespectacled fifty-something holding up his hands in what - a Gomer Pyle gesture?  I noted down the license plate, the place, the time, and proceeded to walk home.

Now, I realize that I am in the land of 7 parliaments, 3 geographic "regions" overlaid with 3 linguistic "communities," with 10 provinces and their governors and 589 communes with their bourgmestres, and that English common law and its notion of "citizen's arrest" carries no weight.  But I wasn't prepared for the answer to my phone call to the local police station.

"No, monsieur, only a policeman can report an infraction of the traffic code."  Oh, I see.  What if I had been run over?  How about the bus and tram drivers, who daily witness multiple "incivilities" that run the gamut from blocking their route to running red lights?  "No, only police can note violations."  As the lady said, just shoot me.

Napoleon and his Code did rule Belgium before it became Belgium, but even in France, the authorities appear to encourage local initiatives for road safety.  Not here: my police station call desk person wasn't even interested in knowing about a major intersection where just posting a cop would result in daily or hourly or minute-ly red light-running tickets.

Aren't they even interested in a little revenue generation?

Bubba Gump Wept

With due deference to the people at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Restaurant and Market®, and to the creators of Forrest Gump, Bubba, and Lieutenant Dan©, attention must shift - urgently - to removing the millions of gallons of crude that is floating around (or suspended under the surface of) the Gulf of Mexico.

As a good friend in Sarasota Florida reminds me, there is the matter of hurricane season.  Airborne "oil spray" is added to the toxic mix, according to this report.  Now BP can put that on its growing list of liabilities.

While I am no expert on the esoteric world of crude oil and its properties - though I've stepped on my share of it on the world's beaches over the years - I do know about VLCCs.  Very Large Crude Carriers (photo, DNV "Managing Risk"). Or how about ULCCs - the nec plus ultra in crude carriers.

These behemoths can carry some 2 million barrels of crude, and according to a recent Wall Street Journal trade item, there seems to be no particular urgency in whether these giants spend their time in the Gulf or in the North Sea.  It's just a market matter.

Well now, how about the Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration, MARAD.  Look at their site, and try to find some reference to the unfolding Gulf BP disaster.  For an agency that just celebrated "National Maritime Day," about its historic achievements, how about a little contemporary activism?

Why not commandeer some of these VLCCs and ULCCs to go off Louisiana and pump up some of that sludge, even if it is a mixture of crude oil, golf balls, and seawater?  At 2 million barrel capacity, you can suck it up and sort it out later at the refinery.

In the time-honored Washington phrase that usually gets bureaucrats moving - "DO SOMETHING!"

In Memoriam

This year we are not making our usual pilgrimage to an American military cemetery for Memorial Day (the photo at left is from Flanders Field a couple of years ago).  But I did get to see the next best thing, the PBS documentary Hallowed Grounds, which shows again on PBS stations in the US next Monday May 31, the official Memorial Day holiday.  The film shows every American overseas cemetery, and provides context to the battles that led to the soldiers' final resting places.

Last weekend we were in Luxembourg, and if any country honors US war dead as much as their own, it is Luxembourg.  Its American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) cemetery outside the capital is home to General George Patton, buried with his troops, many of whom fell during the Battle of the Bulge.  Whether it's Luxembourg, France, Belgium or elsewhere, count on local citizens to adorn each American grave with the Stars and Stripes and their own national flag.

This particular Memorial Day comes at a time when Europe is remembering that 70 years ago, in May and June 1940, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France were reeling under the onslaught of the German blitzkrieg that ended the Phony War.  The Maginot Line, Dunkirk, and all that.

Today, another reminder of wars past and veterans present.  The highest French judicial body, the Cour Constitutionnelle, held that "colonial" veterans from places as far afield as Algeria, Morocco, and Senegal cannot be given second class status in terms of pensions.  Veterans groups hailed the move as a victory for equal treatment.

To the veterans, wherever they are from, and to the fallen, wherever they lie.

Culture: The Singing Diplomat

To be precise, it was actually the diplomat's wife who sang.

We were listening to Edith Piaf's unique voice - are any contemporary singers capable of even a tenth of her emotion-in-song? - when my wife remembered that we once attended a concert in Alexandria, Egypt, where the wife of the French Cultural Center director belted out "Je ne regrette rien" and some of Piaf's other hits.

That couple - though he didn't sing, he certainly knew talent - was a good example of what American cultural diplomat (retired) Patricia Kushlis (Whirled View) meant when she recently wrote about the practice of public diplomacy:

Academia doesn’t and can’t teach hands-on public diplomacy. It can teach about public diplomacy, its history and why it’s important for nurturing and sustaining America’s image abroad, and it can teach some of the skills needed, but not how to do it in practice. That comes from on-the-job experience and training.

There may be another aspect that Kushlis doesn't treat in her excellent post, but which is a standby in debate in public diplomacy circles: the lack of a cabinet level (or at least interagency) home for culture or cultural diplomacy.

What? Howls of protest from the State Department's ECA, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  Don't get me wrong: thank God for ECA, which during the dark years of Iraq, WMD, GWOT, and "with us or against us" had to soldier on, battling in an internal culture war within an administration that weaponized everything, including ideas.

My point is not to criticize US efforts in cultural diplomacy, but to say that other countries see it as more central to their international presence.  Take France, again.  After our dynamic singing cultural duo in "Alex" in the eighties, along comes to Alexandria Olivier Poivre d'Arvror, a man of letters from a family of cultural icons (for more than twenty years his brother Patrick - "PPDA" - was a household name, the Dan Rather of French TV).

Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, who recently published an erudite and beautiful book "Alexandrie Bazar: le roman d'une ville" (image above)  on the city that came to captivate him (it does, I can attest), also heads CulturesFrance, an organization of the French MFA and its Ministry of Culture and Communication.  I know, the US does not have either of the latter, considering perhaps that communication is best handled by spokespeople ("we got 'em in every agency"), and that culture isn't something that you can identify, let alone bureaucratize.

CulturesFrance, whose Euros 35 million budget could fit into a subchapter of the State Department's, may get more bang for its buck, if, as I suspect, France could beat the US in a word association competition with the word "culture."  Think Alliance Française, think Institut Français, etc.  It also doesn't hurt that their Minister of Culture, despite a bothersome fracas a few months ago about his extracurricular proclivities, is another cultural household name.

The US long ago gave up many - but not all (Alex lives!) - of its cultural centers, preferring in some administrations to pursue "placement" (get those press releases on US policy toward Cuba in all the local papers) or in others to wage "the battle of ideas."  A little too much war, maybe not enough love.

I only dabbled in public diplomacy in my years in the Foreign Service, perhaps an illustration of what Pat Kushlis sees as "public diplomacy in the State Department has been too often treated as a “throw away."  If they let me be an acting Public Affairs Officer...  Actually, I took the job pretty seriously, and had lots of fun while I was at it.  Which goes back to her point: public diplomacy and cultural diplomats are made in the doing, not the preaching.

Short of hiring writers, composers, or artists for the US PD function, maybe the most that can be done in the US way of diplomacy is appointing a few cultural people as political ambassadors.  Instead of only rewarding the bundlers who bring in the big bucks, maybe send Oprah as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and shake things up a bit.  Or how about Angelina Jolie to Burma - she's already a UN Goodwill Ambassador.

I vote for the Dixie Chicks as special Middle East Peace envoys.  They have a certain amount of cred.

Medal of Honor

EuroCine27, on May 9th's Europe Day, presents a dilemma to the cinephile.  Which one(s) do you go see, with a film from each EU country to choose from?  Easy choice, given the day's big WW II commemorations in Moscow: Medalia de onoare - Medal of Honor - about an aging Romanian vet who is notified that he's about to get a medal for something he did in the Second World War.

That "something" is shrouded in more than just the fog of war.  Set in 1995, in the first years of the post-Ceausescu post-Cold War era, Medal of Honor is a subtle, wry, touching look at the transition of a Balkan country from Communism to something else.  But what is that something?

The heat either doesn't work at all or turns buildings into steam baths. Wounds inflicted by the Securitate still figuratively bleed.  And the bureaucracy - as brilliantly depicted by a heavily pregnant Ministry of Defense receptionist, all-powerful behind her glass booth - is still capable of wreaking havoc with people's lives.

Ion, the pensioner played by veteran actor Victor Rebengiuc, hasn't given much thought to the war since his service in the Romanian Army a half century ago.  His blunt bayonet sometimes serves to cut a roast, but once he gets a mysterious letter from the Ministry, things change.  He plunges back in time to an incident towards the end of the war, when the Romanians started to turn on their former German allies (or was it occupiers?).  Maybe he was heroic after all...

Ions abound.  Was our man mistakenly singled out for honor, something destined for another Ion?  Then there's Ion Iliescu, Romania's actual President at the time, who has a cameo role as himself.  But which Romania is being honored?  Surely not this Romania:

In a morbid competition with Hungary to curry Hitler's favor and hoping to regain northern Transylvania, Romania mustered more combat troops for the Nazi war effort than all of Germany's other allies combined.

(From the Country Studies series, Romania in World War II).  All those monumental bronzes of Romanian soldiers couldn't have survived the Ceausescu years in honor of the fascists, no.  Ion concludes that it was his act of shooting at retreating Germans - his moment of glory that even he forgot, reminded of it in an old letter written to his wife - that is finally getting recognition.

The knowing snickers from the back of the cinema - Brussels has plenty of Romanians, here at NATO or the EU - told me that director Calin Peter Netzer must have gotten his context and atmospherics right.  Bittersweet is the flavor of Medal of Honor, and the value of the piece of shiny metal is weighed against what really counts - love, family, friendship.

Medalia de onoare has won almost a dozen international awards.  Romania was well-represented among yesterday's 27 European films.  After Medalia de onoare and Tales From a Golden Age, I'm beginning to better appreciate what kind of world Romanians are emerging from.  They probably all deserve a medal.

WW II + 65: Say It With Stamps

It's fitting that former enemies and inheritors of former regimes got together today in Moscow for what may be one of the last big World War II commemorations that can include numbers of walking veterans.  Quite right, too, that the country that suffered the greatest number of casualties be the host.  It's hard to see how Germany could have been defeated without the Red Army's determination.  Click on the stamp at left for an example of the Soviet-era heroic gigantism prevalent in the USSR (from StampRussia).

That other Ally that withstood alone on the Western Front, Great Britain, is of course personified by its wartime leader, Winston Churchill.  His voice, his profile, his very pugnaciousness, stood for so much in the years before the US entered the war.  From the British Postal Museum Archive.

Marching in Moscow for the first time today was the United States, which not only saved the Brits from the Germans, but had to fight off the Japanese throughout the Pacific.  The cartoonist Bill Mauldin, beloved of the foot soldiers but mistrusted by the brass for the scruffy image he gave to GIs, is portrayed in this US Postal Service stamp. Rounding out the Big Four was China, but not the China of Communist Beijing.  Nationalist China, under Chiang Kai-Shek, was at the table with its Soviet, American, and British allies.  No more Soviets at the Kremlin these days, and the Nationalists had to watch the ceremony from Taiwan.  From StampsOfChina.

Finally, France, which though not a member of the wartime Big Four, did manage to stay in the big power league thanks to the sheer will power of then General De Gaulle.  Thanks to French postwar leaders managing to overcome their hatred of Germany for outrages like Oradour (hundreds of men, women, and children killed in cold blood, the entire village burnt to the ground), we have a united Europe today.  Stamp from Timbres-de-France.

Okay, world leaders, well done in the war memorial category.  Now please work together on that even bigger goal: saving the planet from its multiple non-military threats.  It's a much harder target to zero in on.

Cheer Up, Europe: The War's Over

You wouldn't know it, by the looks of the headlines:

"Gloom across Europe as crisis shadow intensifies" Financial Times

"Zeal and angst: Germany torn over role in Europe" Wall Street Journal

"AMB. JOHN BOLTON: We shouldn't rescue Europe" FOXNews.com

Thanks, Ambassador Bolton.  Glad you weren't around during World War II.  And I don't think the Europeans have actually asked the US to rescue them this time.

No, you wouldn't know that today really should be a day of celebration.  65 years of peace across a continent ravaged by two world wars last century.  VE Day - Victory in Europe - never was much celebrated in the United States, which preferred to lump its commemoration of its dead of all wars in May's Memorial Day.

But on this side of the Atlantic, as the BBC On This Day website reminds us, Britons lost no time in celebrating the end of hostilities in Europe on May 8, 1945.  They cheered PM Winston Churchill, "for he's a jolly good fellow."  Didn't keep them, two months later, from voting him out of office.  Gordon Brown shouldn't feel so bad.

VE Day on May 8 is a public holiday in many European countries, though at places like NATO HQ, where some of the losing countries of the war are now major players, it doesn't do to mention the war.  So we have instead the celebration of the postwar peace, embodied in Europe Day, May 9, celebrating 60 years since Robert Schuman sketched out what has since become the European Union.

If only the general mood matched the upbeat Euro-phoria of the Europe Day poster gallery.  It's hard to find committed Europhiles, especially in places like the British Conservative Party, which just may be poised to take over the helm of what is already a Euro-sceptic nation.

Even on the continent, the angst and gloom is general: in Greece, the epicenter of the latest financial-fiscal crisis, it has erupted into violence.  Here in Brussels, a city whose name is synonymous with the EU, not even Europe can appear to help a country seemingly bent on endless separatism in a slow "death of a thousand cuts."

Too bad Europeans don't see the BIG PICTURE.  Which is, 65 years of peace, the product of an alphabet soup of interlocking institutions: NATO, EU, COE, OSCE, OECD.  These "supranational European bodies" might bore you to death with their endless diplo-speak of collective security, single currency, subsidiarity... but these weighty words keep the swords from being rattled.  If you can't make out the Euler diagram (click on image below) of these overlapping institutions, check out this excellent Wikipedia graph.

"Jaw-jaw is better than war-war," Winston Churchill is reputed to have said.  The European Union does talk to excess, at times, but 65 years of jaw-jaw is better than 6 months of war-war.  Europe, count your blessings, do the necessary, and keep that stiff upper lip in the face of a little currency crisis.  It's important, but seen in perspective, pales when the alternatives to collective security are considered.

There is strength in numbers.

Journey to Mecca: In the Footsteps of Ibn Battuta

Karma, I believe, doesn't appear in Islam, so maybe it was just fate that I'd be stopped in my tracks by the poster outside one of Washington DC's Smithsonian museums.

It was Ibn Battuta who immediately caught my eye.  I had just completed hours of meetings inside that same museum, discussing future cultural and educational programs to be conducted in Ibn Battuta's birthplace - Tangier, Morocco - and here he was! U-turn back inside, where I got myself not only an IMAX ticket, but also a couple of related books to lug back in my suitcase.

Enough of my patter.  Here's the thing: Journey to Mecca (official website) is an experience I hope more will share, for it is not only a worthy effort, but breathtakingly beautiful and historically accurate.  How in the world do we know that?  After all, "IB" (as author Tim Mackintosh-Smith called him) lived more than 7 centuries ago.

Because he wrote it down. In the Rihla, or Book of Travels, one of the first of that beloved genre.  Writer/director Bruce Neibaur, fellow screenwriters Tahir Shah and Carl Knutson, and the Cosmic/SK producers have expended prodigious efforts - desert location shooting, thousands of extras (people and camels), multilingual cast - to recreate Ibn Battuta's 14th century world.  The result is a unique look at not only Ibn Battuta's initial, epic 5,000 mile journey across the Sahara and into Arabia, but a pilgrim's-eye look at the Haj as it is performed today.

All on the giant IMAX screen, so that you fly over the desert to the Kaaba, as Ibn Battuta dreamed he would as a young man in Tangier.  The casting of the young Moroccan actor Chems Eddine Zinoun, of whom more later, is inspired, as is the murky figure of his bandit protector, played by Hassam Ghancy.  Ben Kingsley narrates, though the voice-over is mostly excerpted from Ibn Battuta's Rihla.  For Muslims and non-Muslims concerned about authenticity, rest assured that the film makers relied on an illustrious collection of consultants and advisers, scholars from the Muslim world to western universities.

We know how it ends, since we have Ibn Battuta's famous Book of Travels resuming his life of exploration.  But when he sets out from Tangier, he has no illusions about the dangers of solo travel in the wilds of North Africa.  Ibn Battuta confides to family and friends that if he dies, at least it will have been on the road to Mecca.  He is soon put to the test, one of the most dramatic moments in the film.  Though brave, Ibn Battuta knows when to use his wits instead of his sword.  It was a winning strategy, and it served him well to Mecca and beyond: over the next three decades, his travels took him as far as China and India.

If Ibn Battuta lived into old age, sadly the same cannot be said of the young actor who portrays him.  Chems Eddine Zinoun passed away in a tragic car accident in Casablanca just as the film was to be released.  The film is dedicated to his memory.

Journey to Mecca is a moving experience, and even the non-religious cannot fail to share some of the emotion that the pilgrims feel when they succeed in what for many is the dream of a lifetime.  That this pillar of Islam - the Haj to Mecca - has been made accessible to world audiences through an historical docudrama is a tribute to its backers.

Now, can we get it shown in Tangier, Ibn Battuta's birthplace?