WhirledView

Muffins Muffed, Chilies to the Rescue

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I planned to proclaim—Ta! Da!—that anyone can make a terrific muffin, anytime.  As I always have.  Super simple. Super successful.  This morning—alas!—I ended up with two dozen burnt-on-the-top, foam- rubbery blobs studded with lush, sadly wasted blueberries.  Two were edible.  Just.  The rest, I presume, are on their way to the Gulf of Mexico via whatever happens to waste water in Santa Fe.

Here’s the yummy anyone-can-do-it secret I planned to share with you, mainly because it prompted accolades from my grandson who voted yes! yes! yes! for last week’s batch of only twelve blueberry muffins: cinnamon sugar sprinkled plenteously over the batter just before the muffin tins are shoved into the oven.  My banana bread and apple cake often receive the same treatment.  Result: a delicate layer of spicy crunchy sweetness— and the prep’s quicker than mixing up a streusel.

Not that I would ever denigrate anything related to a crumb cake!  I make a weekly pilgrimage to a local bakery where I order a creamy cheese Danish sprinkled with crumbs a la français, plus a double espresso.  To earn this treat, I make myself walk six miles. It’s not torture, mind.  The route is lovely and not gruesomely hilly.  And the Sunday morning treats I remember most vividly from my childhood, aside from waffles flooded with real maple syrup: the crumb buns from a German bakery in South Jersey, whose closest kin I joyously found in Frankfurt-am-Main, when I was working the book fair one year.        

So what happened to the botched batch of muffins?  Stupid me, I forgot to turn a very hot oven down to 350◦ when the muffins went in.  The sugar burnt to black so fast all but two were beyond rescue by the time my nose detected trouble.  Also, having decided to make two batches at once, I blended the hell out of the batter when I was adding the milk and then the blueberries. Delectable muffin texture depends on a truly lumpy batter.  Finally, the butter had got so soft at tropical room temperature I figured I could whip it into the sugar instead of melting it and dribbling it in along with the milk.  Result of inattention  and bad guess experimentation: foam rubber. Usually I’m an apostle of spontaneity.  But, every so often, rules  matter.   How do you tell when?  Ah, well, age does have its compensations.

This tragedy, fortunately, has a deus ex machina.  The new chili season has begun. I’d already decided to turn a muffin story into a sumptuous breakfast story by making a green chili omelet. 

Everywhere in Santa Fe during these days of late summer there’s the smell of chilies being roasted.  This is how it’s done.  A huge cage-like cylinder is nearly filled with red or green chilies,  then rotated over a bed of coals.  When the skins look burnt, the chilies are ready.  (Some things are supposed to be scorched.  Sigh!)

Global Intentions Local Results – Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The subtitle of William P. Kiehl’s comparative study about the international activities of three Pennsylvania colleges is entitled How Colleges Can Create International Communities. Whether this subtitle should have ended with a question mark and been rephrased to read “How Can Colleges Create International Communities – Or Can They and Should They?” is a question worth asking. Each of the three private colleges in question approaches the problem of internationalization differently.

These colleges range from Dickinson College (Carlisle) with its decades old international orientation which attracts a nationwide student body to Elizabethtown and Gettysburg Colleges both of which have been – and remain - more inwardly focused. This, despite their recent attempts to jump – albeit half-heartedly - on the “internationalization” bandwagon in the aftermath of 9/11. Gettysburg College has been the more successful of the two – but both have far to go before they even reach – in my view - the 50 yard line.

In all fairness, Dickinson’s student body is far more diverse geographically. Students are attracted to the college because of its long term focus on international affairs as opposed to either of the two other colleges included in Kiehl’s study. In contrast, Elizabethtown in particular but also Gettysburg College has mostly appealed to students locally.

Town vs. Gown: Parallel not Mutually Supportive Universes

Minorities, Part Four: The Maoists in Eastern India

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

These masks are used by Chhau dancers in the tribal areas of West Bengal.  Chhau is a very acrobatic dance form which also, often, tells tales from the great Indian epics.  When I made an official visit to Purulia and was invited to see Chhau in situ, we visitors also had to watch out for two off-stage threats: insurgents and/or elephants.  In the midst of a very dramatic after-dark Chhau performance, the news arrived that a small herd of elephants was going to cut me and my party off from the guesthouse where we were to sleep.  We left in a flash—very frustrating!—and never saw the least shadow of an elephant in the teak forest.  No insurgents either.

Hostages for Jharkhand

Later I actually was kidnapped (aka involuntarily detained) by tribals.  It was in 2000.  A big strike for the creation of a new state to be called Jharkhand was underway.  The experience didn’t last more than half a day, and I never told the Consul General, because I knew I’d lose the little freedom of movement I’d retained since he’d arrived to embody, arrogantly, aggressively, the State Department takeover of U.S.I.A.   So far as he was concerned, we public diplomacy people were no longer of any significance to the mission.  (Note to all bosses: if you want to be well informed, treat people with respect.)

What happened that day is this:  I needed to travel from Kolkata in West Bengal to Bhubaneshwar in Orissa, where we were opening an impressive exhibit of photos by an American photographer.  I’d decided to drive—a matter of 5 or 6 hours, as I remember—so I could familiarize myself with a part of the country I’d never set foot on.  Then the strike was called and a road closure was announced, on a portion of the national highway I’d have to traverse.  What to do?  I had to reach Bhubaneshwar, but it was too late to obtain train or air tickets.  “Let’s go,” I said to my driver, who spoke Hindi, Oriya and Bengali as well as English.  “We have Consular Corps plates.  No one will stop a diplomat.”  My driver was game.  Off we drove.

How wrong I was.  We were waved off the road and forced to park in a large muddy area that fronted a cluster of shops, eateries, mechanics, etc., all the usual commercial necessities for travelers.  Several other cars had also been pulled off the road.  My driver explained, in all his languages, the usual rules for diplomats.  Useless.  I looked around to get a better idea of who might be in charge.  No principle of organization was obvious or made known to us.  Some young demonstrators seemed more like university nerds than radicals. Others carried bows and arrows that did not look like toys—or like the archery equipment used in modern competitions.  These were tribal weapons and dangerous.  Machetes were also in evidence.  A noisy procession came along.  We appealed to the woman politician who appeared to be leading it.  All she could think of was the new state.  She couldn’t care less about hostages.  The procession disappeared.  Hours passed.  The experience was fascinating, at first, but  boring as time wore on.  We kept appealing. " I’m a diplomat.  We have to get to Bhubaneshwar, etc."  We didn’t dare to start the car and make a dash for it because I didn’t want to run over anyone and cause a diplomatic incident.  Besides the road was still blocked in both directions.  I wasn’t sure the car could blast through.

Then the drinking began.  Behavior changed.   Respect for womankind disappeared.  A definitely tipsy yokel came up to the car and tried to touch my face.  That was the end of the boredom and the beginning of anxiety.  Drunk demonstrators are definitely not to be trusted.  Finally a couple of the student types in trousers and buttoned-down shirts approached us.  They, too, had noticed the change in mood.  They too were worried.  “Trust us,” they said.  They began shouting and pointing toward the jungle behind the shops.  Then they got into the car and told my driver to steer, not for the road, but into the forest, along a rutted dirt road.  I told the driver to obey.  It was our best hope, even though the potential for ending up in an even worse situation was not absent.  Several bumpy miles later, the young men told the driver to stop the car. They got out.  In two more miles, they said, the dirt road would rejoin the highway. The young men would not accept payment.  They were embarrassed, they said.  “You should not have been detained.”  And then they disappeared. 

Minorities, Part 2: Home Sweet Home, If You're Han

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

There was Han-Uighur violence in Urumqi and other Xinjiang cities this past week.  It followed an incident involving Uighur migrant laborers and Han in Guangdong. Chinese officials in Beijing, even so, are insisting there’s nothing wrong with the government’s policies toward ethnic minorities.  The policies are perfectly “effective,” they say, which seems like a brilliantly ambiguous choice of words. Effective for what?  

The Chinese government is never to blame for violence in Tibet, either.  In short, the current rulers of the Chinese empire are never wrong. They are strong. And the ethnics, however numerous, are weak, which means that, even in the absence of "criminal violence," unhappy agitating protesting minorities are always wrong. 

Meanwhile, I’ve just seen a wonderful exhibit of traditional costumes—ceremonial or holiday clothing actually—worn by the men, women and children of ethnic minorities in the southwestern part of China, in this case, Yunan, Guizhuo, Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Sichuan and Hainan Island.    The exhibit (including this Miao headdress and this Yi women's ensemble) came into being thanks to cooperation between the University of Hawai’i and the the Evergrand Art Museum of Taoyuan, Taiwan.  Taiwan, note.  Not the People’s Republic of China, where the heirs of those who once wore these outfits actually live.  Meanwhile, this exquisite collection is currently being exhibited at the International Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe, where an excellent exhibit centered on wayang kulit, the shadow puppets of Indonesia, is also under way.  The IMOFA is one of the treasures of the museum world, another good reason to live in Santa Fe.

Back to the textile display.  The people who celebrated by wearing these beautifully executed costumes could hardly be called barbarians in need of absorbing and civilizing. But that’s what’s happened over time.  So says the curatorial note posted on the wall at the entrance to the exhibit.  The text, however, approaches the issue of political demographics in China via a language of masterful understatement:  “Although each group attempts to maintain their unique culture, assimilation and acculturation with the Han majority did occur....” 

A & A certainly did occur! An interesting study shows that small minority groups in China are very likely to intermarry with the Han majority, thus hastening their own dilution and disappearance.  Members of the more numerous groups tend to be largely endogamous, however.  Hence, the more tenacious clinging to culture among the Tibetans and the Uighurs, who claim they have not always belonged to  China and do not do so voluntarily now.  The triumph of the Red Army over the Nationalists, which created the “People’s” Republic of China, did not bring liberation to minorities:  “Attention to minority rights took place within the larger framework of strong central control. Minority nationalities, many with strong historical and recent separatist or anti-Han tendencies, were given no rights of self-determination.”   Perhaps mainland China does not dare to publicize the glories of its relatively powerless smaller ethnic groups,  like the Miao, like the Yi, lest they encourage members of the larger, better known minorities to insist ever more stubbornly on their own distinctiveness.

Here is how the assimilation process is supposed to work:

Approximately 93 percent [give or take a point or two] of China's population is considered Han. Sharp regional and cultural differences, including major variations in spoken Chinese, exist among the Han, who are a mingling of many peoples. All the Han nonetheless use a common written form of Chinese and share the social organization, values, and cultural characteristics universally recognized as Chinese.

Mandarin is taught in all Chinese schools as the national language. It’s said that over 70% of the population speak Mandarin as their first language.  There are six other major Chinese dialects including "Cantonese, Chu-Chow, Shanghainese, Fukenese, Taiwanese, and Hainese."    One complaint in Xinjiang is that “the government has severely curtailed the use of the Uighur language in classrooms.”   This is no accident.  When language dies, culture languishes.  When populations languish, as frequently with minorities, languages don’t usually survive.

Picturing the Manhattan Project

by Cheryl Rofer

Historical Photos of the Manhattan Project, Timothy Joseph. Turner Publishing Company, Nashville, Tennessee 2009, $39.95.

One Christmas eve – I think I must have been about seven – I woke up early and snuck downstairs. Santa had been there. I was always a sucker for construction sets, and there was one I had wanted: long sticks that threaded through paper squares and triangles, with holes at the end to be joined by pipe cleaners. And a book, titled All About Atomic Energy. I built a flying-saucer-shaped enclosure and took the book inside to read. My parents found me asleep with the book in the morning.

The construction set didn’t last – the paper ripped and the pipe cleaners broke – but my interest in atomic energy and, eventually, the Manhattan Project, continued.

It’s more than a half-century ago now since the first nuclear weapons were built, under the extreme duress of a world-shaking competition. It turned out that the German nuclear weapon project had gone badly, but the competition was felt to be real while it was on.

The clothes and postures look as dated now as photos of Nicholas and Alexandra would have looked to me that Christmas. But I still find them moving, the story full of lessons for today. It’s possible that we aren’t paying attention to the best of those lessons.

Timothy Joseph serves up a full portion of Manhattan Project photos in Historical Photos of the Manhattan Project. He takes note of what I think is the best of the lessons: how quickly a new technology was turned into something usable; regrettably, a weapon. We humans are capable of such ingenuity and competence when pressed. We haven’t yet convinced ourselves to be pressed on today’s technical challenges.

Not 1913

by Cheryl Rofer

Sidenote: This is post number 1913 in the WhirledView blog. That reference is to the interwar years.

I have a running argument with Mark Safranski and Lexington Green. When the idea of getting to zero nuclear weapons comes up, one of their responses is that a world with no nuclear weapons would resemble the world of 1913, in the sense that wars of all against all would again become possible.

My customary response to this (after batting away their ideas that we are talking about unilateral disarmament or that we might have zero nuclear weapons in the next month or so) has been that the negotiations and concessions necessary to move toward zero nuclear weapons will restructure the world in such a way that it will resemble no world we know or have known.

But Nicholas and Alexandra has given me a new argument: Europe is no longer ruled by a single dysfunctional family.

That’s an exaggeration of the Europe of 1913, which was the problem back then. But no such important grouping of countries is any longer ruled by a single family. And there’s more to it than that: the form of rule is important, and the world has pretty much given up on absolute monarchies. There are still autocracies of various kinds around the world, but they are few.

Those Crowds in the Streets

by Cheryl Rofer

I’ve just finished reading Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert K. Massie. A short time before that, I read Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower. And I’ve been listening to Gustav Mahler’s symphonies. I’m not sure why I’ve been in that pre-World War I world so much lately.

Barbara Tuchman tends to give more detail than I really want, but Nicholas and Alexandra is a gem. I haven’t read it until now; it came out in 1967, and, as far as I can tell, has pretty much everything right historically. The photo on the cover of my book, a reprint I picked up in my favorite second-hand bookshop, is this one, in better detail. Both are regal, but Alexandra is sad, Nicholas grave. It must be after they had begun to struggle with the Tsarevich Alexei’s hemophilia.

I’ve read other books on the Russian Revolution, and this one is a new experience. Lenin is barely mentioned until the last few chapters. Massie keeps the action within the imperial family’s bubble. The horrors of the anarchists obtrude when a member of the imperial family is assassinated. The suffering of the Russian people is nowhere as evident as their devotion to matushka and batyushka, the affectionate terms for the Tsarina and Tsar. We know how the story ends, however.

It’s tempting to make an analogy to the people in the streets of Tehran. The people of Russia toppled the Romanovs after many years of grievances against the Tsars. There are other analogies, too, like the demonstrations in Estonia in the late eighties. But, of course, historical analogies are limited.

Hero of Hispaniola by Christopher Teal: Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The February 2009 Foreign Service Journal published an article by Christopher Teal on Ebeneezer Bassett, America’s first black diplomat. The article summarizes Teal’s biography of the same man – a remarkable story that Teal came upon accidentally when he was assigned to the Caribbean as a Foreign Service Officer – and one he researched and turned into a book thereafter.

Bassett, like all other US diplomats until 1924 owed his appointment to political benefactors. In his case, the appointment was a reward for having recruited blacks to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War. His post: Ambassador to Haiti (then spelled Hayti), whose population consisted primarily of former black slaves. He and his family lived there for six years.

A tough assignment then as now

Haiti was a tough assignment for this former educator. It would have been difficult for anyone. The tropical climate took its toll on the health of his Connecticut born family and the Haitian political instability and ensuing violence –characteristics of that country that persist today – were trying. Unlike today with instant communications, however, Bassett was on his own – trying to represent American interests as best he could and communicating with his bosses by written reports transmitted to Washington and dependent for delivery upon the irregular mail. These reports served as a foundation for Teal’s book.

That Bassett possessed innate diplomatic skills helped save his and others lives - many times over. That his appeals for help or guidance were often ignored or passed over lightly by the then Secretary of State made Bassett’s life even more difficult.

Yale Richmond’s From Nyet to Da (4th edition), Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

It’s good to see that Yale Richmond’s book From Nyet to Da: Understanding the New Russia has recently been released in its updated fourth edition. This book, first published in 1992, was designed as a practical guide for Americans interested in conducting business with the newly created Russian Federation as well as other parts of the Former Soviet Union.

What has kept From Nyet to Da from descending into obscurity is that it retains much of its original usefulness. First, not only was it written by a well respected practitioner who spent a substantial part of his US professional career as a negotiator on cultural and educational affairs with the then Soviet Union and learned firsthand how to reach agreement with the Soviets but also because the advice it contains is just plain useful for various kinds of US-Russian negotiations. Moreover, the book is written for the lay person with an interest in Russia as well as the first time negotiator who needs to make use of the advice immediately if not sooner.

Understanding Cultural Differences Is Imperative

What Richmond does best is to 1) explain the importance of understanding cultural and historical differences and nuances when negotiating with Russians; 2) describe these differences by comparing and contrasting American and Russian cultures highlighting how our respective cultures influence our respective negotiating behaviors – so this book should be useful to Russians interested in dealing with Americans too; and 3) provide practical suggestions for reaching successful outcomes.

Along the way, Richmond includes real life vignettes as well as updated data on Russian economic, demographic, geographical, political, legal and social conditions to help provide needed context for the negotiator.

When in Moscow, speaking the vernacular helps

I completely agree with Richmond when he describes the importance of speaking and understanding Russian when negotiating in the country – or the rest of the CIS. It does matter to the outcome. When in Rome, as the old adage goes, do as the Romans do – and speaking the language is a major part of the story. Language study is not just learning and stringing words, phrases and sentences together. Languages are loaded with subtle and not-so-subtle cultural meanings that are crucial for understanding how others think and live.

It’s a sad commentary on American education that the number of American students of Russian has continued to decline since the end of the Cold War. This problem, however, is not just a lack of interest on the part of American youth, rather I think it is more closely related to the downturn in US government funding for programs on and research about this huge part of the globe.

A point of disagreement

Where Richmond and I disagree, however, is with his observation that small talk is necessary to precede successful negotiations with Russians. Even in 1978-80 when everything I did as educational exchanges officer in Moscow involved some level of negotiation – from helping our exchangees get approval for study trips outside of Moscow to participating in the educational exchanges subgroup of the 1979 US-USSR Cultural Agreement negotiations as a member of Richmond’s team. I did not, however, encounter the need – or even the interest – in small talk on the part of the Soviet government officials with whom I dealt.

Whereas, I certainly found the need to speak and understand Russian. This was the language in which we conducted business face-to-face and also by telephone. Even after ten months of intensive training at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, it still took several more months in Moscow for me to bring my skills up to a comfortable level of communication.

This is not to say that I disagree with Richmond when he advises first time visitors to Moscow, for instance, to arrive with names and contact information of trusted Russians to meet or to take the opportunity to see as much as possible of the “real” Russia. These are excellent ideas even though, as he points out, personal safety has become a far greater consideration than in earlier days. Yet in the end, it’s those unique personal experiences which mean exploration well beyond the hotel, dorm room or apartment that make it the fascinating country that it remains.

Yale Richmond, From Nyet to Da: Understanding the New Russia, 4th edition, Intercultural Press, 2009.

WhirledView review of Yale Richmond’s Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008.

A Foreign Policy Insurgency?

by Cheryl Rofer

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, Thomas P. M. Barnett, Putnam, February 2009.

This is the second part of my review of this book. The first part is here.

What Tom Barnett is doing is at least as interesting as his book. The book describes some of it, but not all.

Connectivity, a central concept in Barnett’s thinking, is changing the world. The connectivity provided by fax machines and primitive e-mail helped to undercut the Soviet Union and got the Tianmen Square rebels’ story out in 1989. Now we get tweets as Mumbai is being attacked. We have hardly begun to exploit that connectivity.

Every day, enormous numbers of people discuss enormous numbers of topics on the Web. More people now get their news from the Web than from any other source. Can it be used to develop policy? David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, will tell you that it can be used to elect a president. Developing policy is harder.

Superempowerment?
I belong to a cluster of bloggers who discuss foreign policy and other topics. We read each other’s blogs and link among them. Barnett calls us, if I understand him correctly, superempowered individuals. I’m not entirely happy with the jargon aspect of that phrase or what Barnett seems to mean by it. I have access to a great many things through the internet, true; but there are limits to the power that gives me. One of thosee limits is being heard. If I write a blog and nobody reads it, does it really exist?