WhirledView

A Stub for Mr. Wagoner of GM

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Like most everyone else I chortled as the U.S. car company executives squirmingly confessed to Congress that they’d made their brazen begging missions to Washington on individual corporate jets. You might say, they’d stubbed their well-shod toes rather badly.

Like everyone else I didn’t exactly fall for the hang dog contrition act when the Detroit suits left Washington, begging cups empty, promising to come back with detailed plans for bailout-worthy car production. (Hint: not the promise of a high-powered $40-50,000 hybrid jobbie to tempt the still super rich in 2010!)

However, I missed GM’s very sneaky next act, most likely because it took place while I (and many of you, probably) were caught up in preps for a long Thanksgiving weekend with our families and friends, some of us thankful for a semblance of solvency, others trying to be glad to be alive despite lost jobs and homes.

It seems that GM management quickly came up with at least one plan. Or should I say scheme? You see, assuming the FAA cooperates with a quickly-filed GM request, the next time the chief executive swoops into town on a comfy company jet, Congress (and we taxpayers) will be in the dark about it. It will be a stealth flight, all but invisible, unless someone submits an instant Freedom of Information Act request based on a corporate or bureaucratic leak. Thus, reported BBC at on November 28, the Friday after Turkey Day, “General Motors has asked the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) not to allow tracking of its private jets.”

Hans N. Tuch’s Arias, Cabalettas, and Foreign Affairs – A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

John Brown ends a review of Options for Influence, a new book on the theory of public diplomacy, with the observation that to understand how public diplomacy really works, you should read the memoirs of field tested public diplomacy officers. I concur.

Theory and even strategy are one thing; practice – from ‘waiting for hours at airports’ to meet and greet a visiting US delegation to ensuring that the Ambassador’s piano is tuned correctly for an upcoming performance at the Residence as Brown reminisces - is another.

The good news is that there are several excellent memoirs written by people – now retired – who have “been there, done that” and more. In my view, not only is the practice of public diplomacy learned in the field and the trenches but it is far more fun and instructive to read the stories of former public diplomacy officers than wade through the prose of authors theorizing about a field they have principally viewed from afar.

I reviewed Yale Richmond’s memoirs on WhirledView last April. Now it’s time for Hans (Tom) Tuch. Tuch was the US Embassy Bonn’s Public Affairs Counselor when I worked as German Program Officer in the International Youth Exchange Office in the mid-1980s. He was then in a very senior position that capped a long and illustrious public diplomacy career.

What I hadn’t known about Tuch at the time was his passion for opera. Even the title of his new book, Arias, Cabalettas and Foreign Affairs: A Public Diplomat’s Quasi-Musical Memoir highlights this devotion. His passion for the art form began as a youth in Berlin in 1938 just months before his mother presciently sent him to live with relatives in the United States and thereby escape the coming Nazi wrath.

Mumbai: A Roster of the Horrified—and the (Evidently) Not So Horrified

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The leaders of many (but far from all) countries have strongly condemned last night’s deadly attacks in Mumbai, for which a totally unknown group by the name of the “Deccan Mujahidin” has claimed responsibility. It’s an interesting list.* Here are the highlights:

Europe, the U.S., Canada, Russia, Japan and China have spoken out strongly in condemnation, as have South Asian neighbors Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. South Korea has recoiled; North Korea, as usual, remains mum. With the exception of South Africa’s disapproving reaction, Africa has been silent, even Nigeria. Latin America has also not been heard from. Singapore and the Philippines have been severely critical of the terrorists, while Thailand is probably too busy dealing with a mini insurrection to react to external developments.

Aside from those South Asian neighbors, the only Muslim majority countries to find the slaughter horrendous enough for rapid public condemnation are Indonesia, Malaysia, Kuwait, Turkey and, be it noted, Iran.

Meanwhile, all these hours after the whole world became aware of this ongoing gang rape of Mumbai, the following countries have evidently seen no reason to make public statements either to sympathize with the victims or to condemn the actions of the perpetrators: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, Libya, Algeria, Yemen,Tunisia, the UAE.

What, I wonder, are we to make of this?

*According to a compilation as of 1:00 pm EST in the U.S.

Turkey Day Clichés

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I have been trying to think of something novel and topical to write about Thanksgiving, but all that’s happening is that I am getting more and more disgusted (and bored) by the “disfunctional family and awful friends” theme, Thanksgiving version. Its equally tedious sub-theme is the “miserably overstuffed” lament.

So stop already! If you don’t get along, don’t get together. If you hate turkey and all the rest, cook something else. If you’re full, stop eating.

As for me, I flew quite a distance to share Thanksgiving in a three generation family setting. We all pitch in and cook up a terrific dinner featuring our take on the traditional ingredients. Then we sit down and thoroughly enjoy the repast. We eat a lot more than usual because it's yummy and we feel no regrets because a feast or two a year makes none of us unhealthily fat.

I anticipated this encounter with no dread. I will look back on it with no regrets, and I am looking forward to many more enjoyable, heartwarming Thanksgivings.

The usual verbiage vis-à-vis Thanksgiving suggests that such aberrant good fortune should flood me with vastly humbling gratitude, but it’s hard for me to believe our family situation (which does indeed involve divorce-complicated holiday scheduling) is exceptional. In fact, I suspect that such agreeable family gatherings are really quite normal, but columnists would rather write about people who are sulky, angry, cruel, clueless, or puking.

The other insupportable Thanksgiving genre is the wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the maimed are made happy if not whole and the estranged are brought together, etc. Naturally, if this is your core ideal for Thanksgiving, anything like an ordinary, non-combative, non-transformative sharing of home-cooked food is going to seem pretty bland, pretty banal, utterly lacking in emotional voltage and decibels.

Getting a little more serious and looking a little beyond the purely personal, those of us who are able to eat three squares, and even more on holidays, should probably not be content with bowing our heads (or not) and expressing gratitude on Thanksgiving or any other day. We should probably ask ourselves what we are doing to make it possible for more people to ingest a decent quota of calories daily. This is a cliché, too, I suppose, but at least it takes us beyond self-pity and self-congratulation.

As for me, I vote for a party with some sense of economic justice. I support initiatives touching on human welfare. I write up a storm on related issues. I even have my financially charitable moments. But the truth is, I really don’t do that much. I should probably do better.

How about you?

Tumult and Change

by Bill Stewart

The good news is that with every passing day, it becomes clearer that Americans made the right choice in electing Obama. Both his demeanor and his calm approach to his political appointments and the economic crisis indicate he is the right man in the right place at the right time. The problem of course is that he is not quite there and won’t be until January 20. But he is a man who exudes quiet self-confidence and relishes the contest of good, even radical ideas between people of goodwill and high purpose.

Day Before Thanksgiving Yard Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

I have been remiss about my yard lately, including blogging. But last week I got out there to check things out and water; it had been a long time since we had had precipitation, although things were looking good. And I saw some very interesting things.

Today I was reminded by the local curve-billed thrasher (Toxostoma curvirostre) at the feeder that I have not yard-blogged in quite some time. I let the feeder go empty for almost a month, I think, and the birdbath too. But my winged friends came back instantly when I filled the feeder and birdbath. The commoner birds come back first; there were more house finches than I'd seen before, and the juncos arrived a couple of weeks ago, just about when I got more attentive to their needs. The curve-billed thrasher, I had thought, was a summer bird, but my Birds of New Mexico field guide says that they are year-round residents.

That first photo was one of the interesting things. I dug out the matted roots of cheatgrass a year and more ago from that bed, and covered it with mulch. That has worked well in other beds, but there must have been a lot of seeds in this one.

I've planted a number of things in that bed that I bought at the native plant store at half-price in August. I'm not proud of this bed right now; the cheatgrass will come out rather easily, so that's not it. Rather, I'm concerned about the composition of the bed. The irises down at the narrow end are okay and should fill that part in another year or two. I bought them from a fellow at the Farmers' Market who advertises recycled plants. His iris prices are cheap, and the ones I have look so good and require so little care that I thought I'd add more in the open beds. But there is a variety of other things, and I'm not sure how they will look together. Some will die, of course, and I can replant others if necessary. I've done it before, several times with my Russian sage (which is actually native to Pakistan), and they're now very happy where they are.

That second photo is of a geranium that has some name like blood-leaf, referring to the fact that the leaves change color in the fall (duh!). I'm not going to google it just now for a link; it has very nice purple flowers for too short a time in the spring, but the green is nice and they seem to be happy under a juniper. I bought three of them early in the garden project, and one died. Or seemed to. It (or a seedling in the same place) returned this year. Frost came too soon last year and killed the leaves before they could turn. The top leaves are crisped, but there's some nice color this year.

Finally, every time I look at my prickly pears I am reminded that I want to include them in a yard blog for their good desert citizenship. Look at how those left-hand pads are stopping the soil from eroding downhill. Because my yard is hilly, practically every prickly pear works hard at this. The pads in the soil then develop roots and send out more pads across the mini-arroyos. I took photos of three this morning; this illustrated the process the best. And this is a cactus that was there, not one that I planted. The benefit for the cactus is that it gets more of the water that washes down the hillside during rainstorms.

Cuba: The Sound of (Almost) Silence

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Having dispatched Russian ships across the Atlantic and into the Caribbean for naval exercises with Venezuela, Russian President Dimitri Medvedev met with Hugo Chavez on his way to the recent summit gathering in Lima. The bad news for Russia’s ambitions in the U.S. backyard is that, over the past few weeks, oil prices have plunged, and the Russian stock market is going through very bad times, like others I could name. No one’s feeling flush these days, and expensive promises could be hard to keep. Still Medvedev plans to visit Cuba before his tour of the Americas is over. There’s no way he can drop in without bringing some nice little house gifts.

Meanwhile, China’s President Hu Jintao called on Cuba en route to Lima. China’s trade with Cuba is thriving. It’s worth some $103 billion annually right now, up from $10 in 2000. And yet, though Cuban President Raul Castro is said to have hummed a ditty from the Mao Tse Tung era, the visit of the Chinese benefactor seems to have prompted no anti-U.S. rhetoric on the part of the Cuban leader.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the life-giving IV-line to Cuba was cut off, Cuba went through very difficult economic times, which the U.S. attempted unsuccessfully to capitalize on. Now, not only is Russia back and China generous, but Venezuela is supplying the country with nearly 100,000 barrels of oil a day at very favorable prices. At this point, U.S. sanctions have the hurting power of a gnat bite. If ever there was a time for Raul Castro to indulge in noisy gloating and Chavez-style U.S. baiting, this would be it. But no such juicy quotes have appeared in any of the news reports I’ve read.

Not even when Hugo Chavez was in Cuba, recently, for a pre-election photo op with his idol Fidel Castro. Chavez, evidently, was burnishing his revolutionary credentials by posing for pix with the master, whose post-operative frailty has reduced him to something like a figurehead in Cuba. Interestingly enough, Chavez did not spend the same amount of time with Fidel's brother Raul, who just happens to be president of the country.

This is fascinating stuff. The all but simultaneous arrival of three major benefactors certainly underlines the extent to which U.S. sanctions against Cuba, which always gave the U.S. more emotional satisfaction than real leverage, have outlived any small usefulness they may once have had. How tempting it must have been for Raul to use this confluence to stick it to the U.S., verbally, at least.

If no news is good news, the same might be said for no noise. Whatever the temptations, there was no vitriolic official rhetoric coming out of Cuba. Does this indicate an openness to improved relations with the U.S., despite the seeming plethora of open-handed friends?

If so, it is gratifying to note that the The Brookings Institution has just released a report advocating “a fresh approach” to Latin America, including Cuba. Thomas Pickering, co-chairman of the bipartisan commission which produced the report, notes that younger Cuban-Americans “are less interested in isolating the Castro government than in bettering the conditions of their families still living in Cuba.” Such sentiment goes over well in Florida, but there’s need for a little real politik as well. A more constructive policy toward Cuba might mitigate other influences

Those Turkey Pardons

by Cheryl Rofer

I just took my desktop in to the computer guys because it was making strange noises, and we all know that the one moving part in a computer is the hard drive. Noise equals wasted energy equals stuff going wrong. I've bought a cute little mouse that will make the laptop easier to work with, although it's newer than the desktop and has a number of other advantages...

I've been contemplating the vision of Sarah Palin standing in front of the turkey executions even as she pardons one of them. I must admit that my irritation predates that governor's rise on the national political scene: what is this turkey pardoning business?

One article said that the tradition reaches back to the beginning of time, or something like that, but it seemed to me that I distinctly recalled when the president was not required to appear with what Ben Franklin thought should be our national bird. I kind of like sandhill cranes myself, but I digress.

I've had this conversation with a couple of vegetarians, but the problem goes beyond that. What is this business with "pardoning" turkeys anyway? They are being executed for crimes? Heck no! They are raised for food and, as we see in Governor Palin's video, killed industrially.

What is the purpose of this? To show the great humanity of our elected officials? But then they wouldn't eat a turkey that hasn't been pardoned for Thanksgiving, right? If it's wrong to kill turkeys for food, then they will become rational vegetarians.

Or is it to promote the turkey industry, one of the silly things presidents do, like accepting multiple Christmas trees? Again, if we don't want to eat turkeys because they have done nothing wrong, then this is hardly (with the addition now of a bloody trough in our field of view) a recommendation for that industry.

This appears to explain the origin of the practice in a way consistent with what I recall. It was George Bush the Elder who started pardoning turkeys. (Well, the Thanksgiving kind, anyway.)

Maybe Sarah Palin has done us a favor in highlighting the central hypocrisy of this absurd practice. I'm hoping President Obama will have better things to do, like playing tag on the White House lawn with his children and dog.