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Santa Fe: the Dysfunctional Museum City

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

All you people who love to come to Santa Fe to revel in our oh so charming adobe streetscapes, here’s a sorry tale of what we residents endure to fulfill your fantasies.  Did you know that a bunch of early 20th century Anglo aesthetes cooked up this look that’s as traditional as frozen pizza in Helsinki?  I’ve been thinking of writing this story for some time, but the world kept getting in the way.   Lately, however, my water and power bills have been arriving with slick little inserts designed to browbeat me into taking fewer showers—and those with a dribble of water.  I should also equip my lamps with bulbs whose wattage is totally inadequate for people who actually like to read.  Know what?  I am not inclined to discomfit myself.

Let it be known that I tried to be a super good citizen of the modern world, and I got defeated at every turn by the city of Santa Fe.

Here We Are 

The photo above is not a beauty-is-passé canvas by an up and coming artist.  It’s not a charming example of randomness or spontaneity as art.  It’s not even what I would call organic, exactly, but it shows pretty well how my house grew over the past century plus.  Each roof segment surrounded by a little wall or parapet represents one more addition to the original modest (to say the least) adobe cube thrown up by a very poor man.  When I say adobe, I don’t mean an elegant two course job.  I mean one course (or thickness) and often supplemented with pumice stone or the hollow tiles that preceded cinder block construction.  When I bought this place, it was a wreck, a fixer-upper’s fixer upper—and cheap, which was important because it needed work.  Oh boy, did it need work!  And thus began the tragicomedy of attempting to go green in Santa Fe. 

Renovation being a necessity, not a choice, I decided I wanted to end up with a water-and-energy stingy aka  green house.  Not a glass house for floriculture.  Not a house slopped in green paint. But this:  a house that would use water and energy as efficiently as possible, given the givens.    As for the facade, major surgery was necessary, but that was nixed by authorities, as were all my other dreams.  So the front of the house looks like a jungle now, as you can see, mostly xeric plants that need very little water and very little care, the latter my idea of the perfect garden. What you can’t see through the foliage isn’t worth seeing.

The Bottleneck

My problem (and the problem for all residents of Santa Fe) is the Historic Commission, which decides what you can or can’t do to new or older houses.  The Commission pores over floor plans and elevations and refuses to approve those that don’t place windows a full four feet from any corner of the structure.  There's hardly a spot in Santa Fe without a wonderful view, but view-embracing expanses of glass also fail the test, because the original Spanish colonists obviously didn’t have picture windows.  Of course, most of them didn’t have glass windows either, to say nothing of indoor plumbing.  So I guess we should be grateful.  Sort of.  Or laugh.  And order windows with phony dividers, which can mysteriously disappear.  Money wasted, but c’est la vie.  

So I’m writing this piece because I think that Santa Fe’s building and design codes should be changed for everyone—and for the health of the planet, but I must confess that I got into this fix by stupidity and  insufficient research.  I knew nothing of the Historic Commission when I bought this property.  I especially didn’t know that the structure  I was buying appears on mysterious but very important maps as a “contributing” structure.  That means it represents Santa Fe at some “authentic” phase of its history. 

I’ve met people who tell me they fought to keep their homes from designation as “contributing.”   Unfortunately, the family that built and lived in my place for three generations wouldn’t have had the funds to renovate creatively even if they’d wanted to.  Thus, the fact that the poor man’s home they couldn’t even afford to keep livable had been frozen in time didn’t affect them, especially since this buyer was so ignorant.  Result: not only did I have to conform to the constricted official notion of the "Santa Fe style," I had to respect the integrity and external appearance of the existing structure, which believe me—and I’ve delved into histories of New Mexico architecture—is of no significance whatsoever. Gulp!

The Bucket Brigade

What did I want to do?  I wanted to move the water heater from one end of the house to the middle, where the old structure met the wing I miraculously got permission to add.  No go.  Result: several gallons of water are lost before the water runs hot enough for a shower in the master bath.  Actually, I’m supposed to collect this otherwise wasted water in buckets, which must then be schlepped outside to water plants with.  We’re talking many many buckets here—and buckets of water are heavy.  Very heavy.  Now  I’m not happy about wasting water, but the city also refused to let me install a gray water system.   All of that slowly warming water, along with sink water and water from clothes washed in appropriate detergents, could have been put to good purpose without the efforts of this bucket brigade of one.

Blind Buddhas and Incendiary Cartoons

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Santa Fe is full of Buddhists, but no one has erupted with religious rage since this image (a sculpture by David Kimble Anderson) was placed on display in the atrium of a building that housed an art gallery and other business enterprises.  As anyone with the least facility in reading symbols will immediately have grasped,  there are innumerable ways of interpreting this work of art.  Since many possible interpretations are decidedly negative, I found my recalling the violent  reactions to the now infamous Danish cartoons, which were condemned by many believers as an affront to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.  The result?  Riots in several countries.  Some people unfortunately died.

Multiple Interpretations

Let’s consider some ways in which the Anderson piece might be understood.  The gold surface could be an indictment of materialism on the part of traditional Buddhist temple builders or on the part of current practitioners whose lives verge, hypocritically perhaps, on the sumptuous.  Of course, many traditional images of the Buddha are also flamboyantly gilt, to symbolize the transcendent value of the teachings and to honor the one who enunciated them.

In this case, however, the figure appears to be bandaged.  It is, evidently, blind and essentially quadriplegic.  Unable to see.  Unable to act.  Impotent.  Useless.  Is this a statement about the futility and irrelevance of Buddhism? On the other hand, meditative insights are available to those who sit without moving,  looking inward.  Sometimes these insights have effects that are far more powerful than actions that are not guided by wisdom. 

Which, one wonders, did the sculptor have in mind?

Mummies, Too

I simply don’t know.  When I first saw this image, I was and still am totally ignorant of the sculptor’s intention, as ignorant as many of those who rioted over the Danish cartoons surely were.  Nor would many of those angry Muslims have cared in the least whether the cartoonists’ intentions were pure or not.  The cartoons, taken at face value, appear to insult the prophet.  Enough.

This past weekend I had an opportunity to show a photo of the blind Buddha to a very knowledgeable Buddhist teacher/scholar.  “Give me your first reaction,” I asked.  “How do you feel?  What are your unconsidered thoughts?”  I should have known better.  I did not get any unconsidered thoughts. 

But I did get some interesting information.  This scholar said that the image reminds him of the mummy of Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Cha’an (or Zen) Buddhism, who was born in AD 638 and is known for enunciating the revered Diamond Jewel Platform Sutra.  Evidently it was the custom to mummify great teachers back then in China.  The proper term, I just learned courtesy of Google, is “whole body relics.”  Mummies!  This seemed strange to me.  Buddhism supposedly teaches impermanence, while mummies are intended to make the physical remains last forever or as long as possible.  My bewildered personal reaction to Buddhist mummies notwithstanding, could Anderson’s work be an homage to Hui Neng?

And so the inquiry widens, opening my horizons, giving me pause to think.

Thoughts on South Africa, Zimbabwe, Israel and Palestine

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I was mostly on retreat last week, which is why I wasn’t posting, but only as a commuter, so I was able to sneak a look at two PBS programs that turned out to be entirely consistent with what I was doing during the daytime.  I saw the Masterpiece Contemporary presentation of Endgame, an utterly compelling docu-drama about the secret negotiations that preceded the  official negotiations for the end of apartheid in South Africa and a Bill Moyers interview with South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who led the UN commission of inquiry into human rights abuses by Israel and by Hamas last year.  These are the thoughts that emerged.   They begin with Zimbabwe.... 

Banes of Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe, I suspect, calculated that a power-sharing agreement with Morgan Tsvangirai would placate the West and bring in the big bucks he needs to provide food and rudimentary survival services to a population he has ravaged and terrorized.  Dutifully, his new prime minister set out on a begging trip, hoping to convince prospective donors that the shotgun marriage was cozy and legit.  When the would-be saviors, U.S. and European, saw through the ruse and refused to cough up enough to suit the white-baiting octogenarian president, Mugabe seems to have lost interest in the PR value of minimal cooperation with Tsvangirai, who is now more or less on strike.  So Mugabe has resumed his well-honed harangue: all of Zimbabwe’s current miseries can be traced to colonialism, even if Zimbabwe was in terrific economic shape when the British left in 1980.

Meanwhile, starving, sick, miserable and thoroughly desperate refugees finally began streaming into South Africa from neighboring Zimbabwe.  The result: murderous local mobs pushing back from South African townships whose residents have not prospered as they had hoped in the years since apartheid gave way to majority rule.  Their cry: how can we share when we have so little?  Although South African police managed to quell the worst of the violence, South Africa has continued its policy of not seriously pressuring Mugabe to reverse course or to resign, despite urging by the U.S. and others.  African nations, for obvious reasons, are very touchy about sovereignty. 

The good news is that South Africa itself has not been destabilized by spillover from disarray next door.  Nor has the post-Mandela leadership adopted the poisonous anti-White propaganda and policies of the Mugabe regime.  Whites continue to be a relatively prosperous minority in South Africa where they have a significant presence in urban and rural economies.  Whites also continue to be personally safe, as far as anyone is safe in South Africa’s crime-ridden cities.  This accord didn’t happen by chance.  Unlike Zimbabwe, where Mugabe is the black mirror image of the implacable white racist Ian Smith, South Africa has produced some remarkable leaders, men who saw that retribution, deserved or not, was no way to achieve stability and prosperity in a post-apartheid country.

South African Treasures

South Africa was blessed with Nelson Mandela, who became the reincarnated country’s first president, with Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu who served as conscience for the reborn country, and with a Boer realist  F.W. de Klerk who knew when the game of white monoply on power was over.  South Africa was also blessed with a nationalist party whose millitant wing  was willing to lay down arms without preconditions and let the party leaders join in the process of writing a new constitution.   Long jailed lawyer and African National Congress leader  Nelson Mandela would have as Vice Presidents ANC activist Tabo Mbeki, who would succeed Mandela as president, and—yes!—that very same F.W. de Klerk.  Finally, instead of setting up a war crimes court, the new government chose to conduct a truth and reconciliation process: tell the world exactly what you did, however horrible, and you’ll be free to build a new South Africa with us. 

Confessing is hard.  Letting go of vengeance is equally hard.  By and large, the process seems to have worked. The new South Africa was made possible by realism and idealism, by mediation, negotiation and diplomacy, plus a willingness to live and work together and a disposition to try and trust one another.  The economics, however, have been a little disappointing. South Africa may be the most prosperous sub-Saharan country, but not all share equally in that GNP.  Some Blacks have become very very rich.  Others are hardly better off than they were under the Boers, which makes for anger.

Looks Like We’ve Given Up

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

For decades now the US has been closing its cultural centers and trying to whip up enthusiasiam for cheap substitutes which surveys have shown to be ineffectual.  The rationale for the cost cutting jag?  That old end of history canard.  Once the Cold War was over, there’d be no need to promote the American brand.  We’d won.  The future was us—the U.S.

The Greeks were so right about the need for self-knowledge and the dangers of hubris.  Our joy and relief when the Berlin Wall came down were so extreme that we thought the U.S. would be on top for ever—well, there were some level headed sorts who considered such thinking to be absurd, but they were pooh-poohed.  We cut back on our public diplomacy programs, and within ten years our public diplomacy agency went poof!  Gone.  In all fairness, I need to add that the Brits were cutting back on British Council expenditures, the French were less generous to their Alliance Française operations and the Germans were closing Goethe Centers, too.  The West, in general, was pretty smug about winning the Cold War and was determined to reap financial dividends.

But history, as it will, moved on.  Islam exploded, Russia refused to play the role of deferential poor provincial cousin, and if the 20st century was the American century, the competition for which country will dominate the 21st century seems to be constrained only by the never properly appreciated or understood efforts of India to deny the honor to the Chinese.  However, the Chinese are looking so good that the Russians, evidently, have decided to follow the Sino one-party-capitalism model to prosperity.

Meeting Gods and Godesses in Kolkata

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

For nearly two weeks, day and night, Bengalis have been paying homage to Durga their favorite goddess.  But now her effigies have been carried, carted or trucked from their places of honor to be tossed or toppled into the Houghly River.  Sic transit gloria.  All is transient.  Calcutta/Kolkata will return to hyper-crowded, high-energy normality, until the next puja, in honor of Kali or Manasa or Kartik or Saraswati or Ganesh or—the roster of honorees is practically countless.  Calcutta is almost always preparing for or recovering from one puja or another, as I discovered on Day One, for me, in the vibrant city that turned from Calcutta to Kolkata while I was living there.

Kartik

En route from the airport, I found myself being driven down a street along which everyone in sight seemed to have something to do with making effigies.  In open-front shop after shop, artisans were engaged in what turned out to be a four-part process.  (1) Make a humanoid armature of  bamboo strips.  (2) Flesh it out with straw.  (3) Cover it with papier mache.  (4) Paint it flamboyantly.

Kartik puja was days away, it seemed, and I had a decision to make.  Kartik, like the more widely known Ganesha, is a son of the Hindu god Shiva and his wife Parvati.  One of his modern duties is to serve as the god (eg patron saint) of mechanics and engineers.  I, as in-coming supervisor of team that included drivers, mechanics, audio-visual specialists and computer systems operators, had to say yea or nay to the business  of setting up an image of Kartik in our garage.  “Is it customary?” I asked.  The answer was  “Yes.”  So Kartik was duly installed, with a garland of marigolds around his neck.  Who wanted accidents or computer crashes over the next 12 months?  What’s more, if we could have Kartik in the garage, we could have a Christmas tree in the lobby when December rolled around.  Eid treats, in turn, would also be enjoyed by all, Muslim or not. Hurrah for festivals!

Durga

But Kartik puja had nothing, festival-wise, on Durga puja, when every intersection in the city was likely to offer a resplendent image of Durga off to the side, if not plumb in the center, traffic be damned.  In rich neighborhoods Durga images could soar to an awesome 20 feet.  Neighborhood associations collecting funds in less affluent areas would have to be content with a Durga closer to the measurements of an ordinary woman.  Always, however, she’d be lacquered in bright colors and dressed in gaudy glittery raiment.  That much was traditional.  Then came the strings of lights draped above and all around each and every one of her, and the huge loudspeakers with their gaping bells broadcasting Bollywood favorites and static incessantly. 

The Field: Where Foreign Policy Succeeds or Fails

Public Diplomacy Today

Part 4

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

Foreign policy needs and goals are defined in Washington, but foreign policy succeeds or fails in the field.  Attention is sought.  Criticism is met.  Competing influences are neutralized or co-opted. Friends are made. Alliances are built.  Goals are achieved—or not.   It helps hugely when policy is intrinsically attractive.  Being militarily strong helps, too, up to a point. Overwhelming strength is often resented.  It becomes, paradoxically, a disadvantage to be adroitly overcome, since no other country wants to appear to have been coerced.  But raw power flaunted or sheathed, even the U.S. can’t go it alone in today’s world.  Public diplomacy’s role is to move governments by inspiring their citizens to see American goals as good for them, too.

The Trifecta:  Information, Culture, Education

Public Diplomacy in the field, at post, works both directly and indirectly.  It aims simultaneously for immediate and longer term impact, the two time lines corresponding roughly to the two branches of traditional PD work: information and culture.  Sometimes the information function is confused with the manipulations better known today as propaganda, although PD’s need for reliability and credibility makes it more akin to journalism.  Cultural programs are often dismissed as frills, expensive indulgences whose impact is difficult to measure, which is true, but only because conventional polling is at its weakest when assessing qualitative phenomena and complex interactions. Straddling the two, though not customarily administered as such, are the educational programs which involve knowledgeable Americans interacting with foreign audiences, short trips to the U.S. for promising mid-career foreign citizens, youth exchanges, academic exchanges like the Fulbright program and even, until recently, university linkages. 

Informational, educational, cultural—these are the co-equal mutually-supportive elements of an effective PD program.  Properly orchestrated, they enhance the overall American image, making the U.S. better understood and more attractive as an ally.  They create lasting links between individuals and institutions, which keeps doors open and ensures a hearing when tough or sensitive issues need support.   They provide, via all media platforms, relevant, accurate and timely information to foreign publics whose mobilization is critical if American foreign policy goals are to be met.

Planning for Success

Because every country is different—even Canada and the United States differ in ways that would call for modulated communications strategies—a Washington-dictated, one-way, one-size-fits-all approach to public diplomacy, however tempting it might seem to bean counters, doesn’t work. Therefore, once Washington establishes policy priorities, experienced, skilled, perceptive  and imaginative field officers must be trusted to devise ways to sell it. 

In the past, USIA posts were required to submit an annual country plan assessing the state of the bilateral relationship, describing (in cooperation with the entire mission) how the post proposed to nourish the relationship while promoting, according to carefully specified strategies, Washington’s policy priorities and, last but not least, requesting the financial, human and material resources to do so.  Expectations for evaluation and feedback were built in.   Naturally big posts in big countries enjoyed more staff and bigger budgets.  But all posts in all countries were guaranteed sufficient resources—Public Affairs Officer plus American and/or locally-hired personnel; a vast range of highly-responsive, Washington-based backup services; firewalled budgetary authority; the wherewithal to run a full service American Center; an appropriate inventory of up-to-date equipment; and, last but not least, PD-controlled vehicles—to offer a high-quality, well-balanced, year-round program that could and would put America in the best possible light.  

The State Department has a habit of bemoaning the lack of administrative skills among its high level officers—and yet, at every post, there was, for decades, a whole cadre of field-tested managers who were also Foreign Service Officers: the public diplomacy people.  Even fairly junior officers had managerial responsibilities, and anyone who wanted to be a Public Affairs Officer had to be an adroit CEO, a dollar-squeezing CFO, a supervisor with a knack for delegating, a program coordinator, a cultural impresario, a human resources geni, a master of media, a public relations whiz, a social psychologist, a linguist, a self-confident performer—and make it all look smooth and easy to the public, which is why, perhaps, the typical State Department officer found it so difficult to appreciate what those public diplomacy colleagues were doing.  Even today there are calls for outside hires to supply the State Department with managerial talent.  Meanwhile, the superb managers that State acquired when it absorbed USIA, were ignored or devalued.  Many, therefore, retired prematurely.  Although a very few prospered and even became Ambassadors, Deputy Chiefs of Mission or Consul Generals, most public diplomacy operational skills are in a state of disuse bordering on atrophy and will soon be lost, except as recorded in the memoirs of better times. Talk about squandering capital!

Ode to PB&J for Labor Day

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Well, not an ode exactly, since I’m not dishing out poetry.  But this is, for sure, a tribute to the Great American Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.  Ta da!

Tomorrow is Labor Day, the official finale of the summer out-of-doors season.  It’s traditional to go for a picnic that allows us to lament the passing of time while appearing to have a sunny, full-of-smiles good time.  Depending on where you live, I bet you are planning a trip to the mountains or the beach or a lake or a park.  No?  Well, a lot of us are.  So we will compete with other picnickers for the least splintery table with the most shade, over which we’ll fling something or another to serve as a tablecloth.  Or maybe we’ll settle onto some remoter patch of sand or grass or any other surface that’s fairly level and can be sat on, comfortably, sort of, all things natural considered.

Some of us are going to unpack a vast array of gustatory delights from hampers and coolers.   I will not.  I get restless, impatient, antsy, just sitting around, so I like to hike or walk or trudge or plod, depending on the terrain, my mood and that old fitness thing.  Eventually hikers get hungry.  They need food, which gravity will have lured to the bottom of the day pack, under the rain gear and wallet and first aid requisites and tissues for you know what—and so the rooting around begins.

The Gorp Gobble

A car picnic quite naturally invites excess.  But I’m absolutely astounded by what my fellow trekkers/hikers load themselves down with in the way of food on the trail.  First of all, they gobble gorp or bite off chaws of energy bars with every other step, lest they be unable to perform as relentlessly as some fuzzy, pink, long-eared, drum-beating, Madison Ave. creature that keeps going and going and going. Picture it.  These extremely well-nourished Americans are traversing a mere ten miles (or much less) of far from life-threatening terrain and they’re afraid they’ll collapse.  Happily they aren’t faced with a real world death march.  Corregidor?  The Navaho or the Cherokee Long Marches during our Manifest Destiny phase? 

But hey!  Any excuse to satisfy the munchies.  As with energy bars: high profit, industrial-chemical-estate-launched assaults on taste buds and intelligence. Or gorp—love the word, not so the mix.  Nuts: mmm-mmm good and good for you.  Raisins: nutritious and tolerable, eating-wise, to my mind.  Chocolate chips: more! more!  But when micro-bits of one tasty tidbit sluff off onto the others?  Not entirely serendipitous. 

Le Picnique

So what do these people who are hardly under-nourished pull out of their day packs when we settle ourselves on some pelvis-cradling rocks for lunch?  This: gourmet take-out with snap-top plastic containers.  Curried chicken salad.  Tabbouli with hummus and pita.  Salade niçoise or russe —or equally complicated delicacies from home and not mere leftovers either.  All in containers that’ll have to be schlepped out—along with the requisite dirty spoons and knives, whether plastic or civilized. 

Now I like an elegant picnic once in a while, but on the trail give me good old PB&J.  First of all, the makings are always available so I don’t have to think ahead, make lists, shop.  Second, I’m always amazed, once I’ve taken that first bite, to discover once again that the Great American Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich is worth bragging about.  Third, it’s indestructible on a hot day.  Fourth, it’s easy to handle.  Just wrap it in waxed paper, pop it into a baggie and throw it into the pack.  Fifth, there's almost nothing to pack out.  Finally, it’s real food.  It gives me protein, non-artery-clogging oils, salt to replace what I’m sweating out.  What's more, I’m supplied with plenty of energy and I’m stuffed enough to keep the afternoon hungries away.  

Public Diplomacy: What It Is, Why It's Needed and How It Could Work Well for America Again

Part One

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

 This is the first of a five part series that will, on successive Wednesdays, (1) define some of the special characteristics and powers of public diplomacy as such, (2) examine some of the missteps that have brought American public diplomacy into disrepute and made it ineffectual, (3) look at some demonstrably successful best practices that may form the basis of a rehabilitated public diplomacy capacity and (4) suggest some organizational reforms that would integrate public diplomacy insights into the foreign policy process in ways that would enormously enhance U.S. interactions with the world.

Music, art, drama, literature---there are so many way of sharing culture across national borders. Our lives are enormously broadened, deepened and enriched when we learn from one another, and  governments often make it possible, through subsidies and various complex negotiations, for exhibits and performances to be mounted in distant countries. To the extent that familiarity increases mutual respect and understanding, the world benefits from a multiplicity of such interactions, and public diplomacy uses some of these cultural and intellectual resources to good effect. 

 However, the purpose of public diplomacy, which employs other media as well as the arts, and the reason it deserves strong support and generous funding by the American people has little to do with idealism or purely benevolent inclinations, however much the authors of this article are delighted to encourage and enjoy the arts as private citizens. 

 Public diplomacy is what America does when the U.S. needs popular support in other countries for American policy, which is almost always the case.  Public diplomacy, well done, pressures governments to do what leaders might be less inclined to do behind the closed doors of traditional diplomacy.  In short, cultural and intellectual interaction for public diplomacy purposes isn’t chummy chitchat.  It’s a carefully articulated, infinitely modulated, multi-media campaign for achieving essential national goals. Public diplomacy, along with traditional diplomacy, works hard to avoid that hideous waste of life and resources called war, which is seldom as cheap or conclusive as habitual hawks would have us believe.    

 Government-to-government diplomacy is an ancient and essential function, but public diplomacy is a newer tool that only governments with good things to share and relatively little to hide can use effectively.   As the diplomatic tool par excellence of democracy, public diplomacy operates by precept and example.  Public diplomats disseminate information that can stand up to critical or even hostile examination—and when truth penetrates secretive or corrupt regimes the hold of tyranny erodes.    Conversely, should an exemplar of good governance fall into patterns of deceit, dishonesty, abuse of power, corruption or hypocrisy, the way back is difficult.  Credibility has been lost.  “Psychological operations” won’t regenerate confidence in U.S. leadership.  Smarter policy and intellectually-respectable public diplomacy may.

The Shambles that’s U.S. PD Today

The ramshackle public diplomacy architecture created in 1999, when the functionally-coherent Unites States Information Agency (USIA), a world-respected advocate for American values and policy, was married, shotgun-style, to the State Department, has never performed as its cost-cutting designers promised.  Bits and pieces of a once coordinated whole were scattered dysfunctionally among the offices and bureaus of a chronically underfunded State Department.  Even the once authoritative VOA was devalued and dismembered, its remains hardly differentiated from the proliferation of voices aimed manipulatively at slivers of audience here and there.

Soto Ayam: an Epic Soup and Easy to Make

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Java has its own version of the Indian epic known as the Mahabharata and its own ways of telling the story. All or parts are usually presented during night long puppet shows, sometimes via shadow puppets made of leather, sometimes via stick puppets, but always manipulated and narrated by masterful dalangs backed up by singers and a gamelan ensemble. Typically the Javanese versions also feature interludes of repartee thanks to a supplementary cast of beloved ignoble characters, who inject comic relief as the inexorable cosmic tragedy unfolds. Think Shakespeare, as in Romeo and Juliet, where puns and lewd humor serve the same purpose.

It's hard to envision Romeo dealing with a plate of slippery spaghetti much less Arjuna spilling soup on his dhoti, but the comic characters are allowed all the crude human functions like eating and drinking, etc., etc. And the audience certainly needs sustenance. So today I'm presenting, as my last salute to Farmers' Market vegetable soups, a version of soto ayam madura, which is to say chicken soup Madura style. Madura is a large island hovering in a broad bay just off the city of Surabaya in East Java, but some version of soto ayam is available wherever street food is offered in Sumatra as well as Java.

Join me in Indonesia. It's dusk at last. Strings of little electric lights are suddenly asparkle, to keep the gathering darkness at bay, with the help of the oil lamps standing on many tables and shop counters. The equatorial air is cooling, at last, and a hint of a breeze makes the evening even more refreshing, so the street is thronged with people shopping or strolling, like you. You pass food vendors selling boiled crabs or chicken satay or morsels of rice wrapped in banana leaves---or beer, realize you are hungry and slide into a bench facing a table laid with plastic or old fashioned oilcloth. A huge bowl, a cheap Chinese export, is plunked down in front of you, usually with a mouth-stretching stainless steel spoon, occasionally with a porcelain scoop. An island that's really a chicken leg or breast rises from a steaming lake of savory broth that barely covers a generous serving of rice and vegetables. In case the spicing doesn't burn enough, you may choose among bottles and shakers full of red stuff to make the meal as mouth-tingling as you like. Slurp! Slurp! Delicious!

Soto ayam also makes for a fun dinner at home. So here's how, with one caveat. Adjust all amounts to feed the gang you expect at the table:

Cut a chicken into serving-sized pieces, load it in a big pot and cover it with plenty of water. Throw in a piece of ginger half the size of your thumb and three fat cloves of garlic roughly chopped. Follow up with a tablespoon each of ground coriander and cumin plus a teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper. To make a richer broth, I also add a large onion, two carrots and three stalks of celery, all chopped. Sometimes I throw in six whole cloves. Simmer. When the chicken is done, still moist but not bloody inside, which could be within 30 minutes or less, remove the pieces you'll be serving, leaving the neck and back and tail and heart and gizzard in the broth while you boil it down for a more intense flavor. Once you are satisfied with the broth, turn off the heat, strain the broth and return it and chicken to the pot for reheating just before serving.

Meanwhile, you will have set your rice to cooking, and you have chopped up lots of green onions and a pile of fresh coriander. Now slice a lime or two into eighths. Finally, steam some green beans and some smallish cabbage wedges. While these are still a bit crunchy, add a few handfuls of bean sprouts to the steamer. All will be ready to serve in a minute or so.

Yes, you may add or substitute any other vegetables you happen to like as much or better. Home cooking needs to be free and creative. Personalized, not slavish. If you want something pure and absolutely authentic, find a restaurant or take a trip to Indonesia, which isn't a bad idea, actually, though a bit more expensive.

To serve: empty the reheated broth and chicken into a large bowl or tureen, which you'll set in the middle of the table. Arrange the vegetables, hot from the steamer, on a platter, and put the chopped coriander, the chopped green onions and the lime segments into little bowls for easy passing around. Finally, provide a bowl of sambal olek, which is a paste of red chilis - no vinegar, no onions, nothing but chili. This is the only exotic ingredient, and these days it's available in most grocery stores.

Now the fun begins. Everyone starts with an empty soup dish and fills it up with chicken, broth, rice, vegetables and condiments in any old order. Boarding house reach is a plus, when it comes skewering slabs of chicken or ladling hot chicken broth. This, naturally, leads to near collisions and much laughter - definitely an ice breaker, a wonderful comic interlude in the terrible seriousness of life and love.

Squeeze some lime over the combo. Stir in some sambal olek. As I said before: Slurp! Slurp!

Should there, by some miracle, be any leftovers, the solution is simple: dump everything (except the limes) into a pot for reheating the next day. I'd debone the chicken at this point, but it's hardly necessary.

Photos of Indonesian stick puppets by Patricia Lee Sharpe.

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!)