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WV Travel Advisory

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Dear Readers and Commenters - Just to let you know - Pat and I are both traveling. We will resume regular WV posting on Monday May 3.  We look forward to seeing you again then.  

A Macabre Filipino Election Tale – Where the Past Intrudes Upon the Future

By Patricia H. Kushlis

 

Fortunately it’s not everywhere where an embalmed body intrudes so prominently into an election campaign as is now taking place in the Philippines.  But, at least according to the Washington Post in a front page – albeit below the fold - story on Thursday April 29, 2010 that’s what’s happening. 

The body, of course, is that of Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino dictator who ran the country into the ground and then was run out of town - transportation courtesy of the US military – in 1986 by the Filipinos themselves in a coordinated effort of left, right, center, church and army that included not just the Communists but also the Roman Catholic Church’s very own Cardinal Sin and Marcos’ West Point trained Army General cousin Fidel Ramos.   When I worked in Manila for the US Embassy between 1992 and 1994, Ramos had just been elected president for a single six year Constitutionally-mandated term. He not only kept his word stepping down at the end of year six but he also restored electricity to the then power starved capital city – and for this alone I am eternally grateful.  

 

Actually I had worked in Makati in what soon thereafter became the defunct US cultural center thanks to parsimony and a misguided American vision of the future. The center was shuttered, the books donated to a private university and the Cultural Section’s remains smushed into an outhouse next to the fortress Embassy on Manila Bay.  That short-sighted fiasco in American diplomacy, however, is another tale for another time.

 

But back to the Marcos - Imelda and her husband’s dead body.

 

Ferdinand Marcos hailed from the north – from Leyte.  While he was squeezing everyone else, jailing the opposition and wife Imelda amassing a massive shoe collection, he was pretty generous to his home region and province (Ilocos Norte) so the Leytians, if that’s the right word for them, liked him.  After he died in exile in Hawaii, Imelda, former beauty queen and shoe collector, tried to have his body returned to the Philippines to its final resting place.  She only partially succeeded. 

 

The Slapdash Cook Throws Together a Pot of Posole

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

When you visit an Indian pueblo on Christmas day, you will be invited to join one or more families for the midday meal.  In fact, you will receive invitations from many families.  No prior acquaintance needed.  Just seat yourself at the table, and you will be served the traditional dishes of the native peoples of the Rio Grande valley.  If you feel awkward, you are suffering from your own hang ups.  Your hosts are hospitality incarnate.

One of the dishes you will sample is posole (pronounced po-so-lay). It’s made of pork, chicos (corn kernels processed much like hominy) and chili peppers cooked in water with oregano.  No magic happens during the cooking.  You’ll be served a stew of discrete elements in a watery broth.  A serving of fry bread, which is just that, adds a little rib-sticking sinfulness to the meal.  And fun.  Poke a hole and steam comes out.  Which gives you hot chili with hot bread. Guaranteed to chase the chill out of a cold December day.  (But it won't look or taste like this pot of posole.)

The Limits of Authenticity

Now when people are extending this incredible hospitality to a complete stranger like me, I am not inclined to be a hyper-critical foodie.  But posole as a side dish in a New Mexican restaurant isn’t much more interesting.  The same insipid broth.  The same non-communicative ingredients.  Boring—unless the peppers are tongue-burning hot, in which case nothing else matters. Still, traditional posole is basic nutrition.  It will keep you alive.  You will get the  same dish when you order posole at the New Mexico State Fair, and it’s the recipe in my ancient recipe trove, a skinny paperback entitled The Complete New Mexico Cookbook.*

So much for authenticity!  Sometimes tradition shouldn’t be tampered with.  Sometimes evolution is a good thing. 

A More Succulent Version

Shortly after I arrived in Santa Fe, I was invited to dinner in an old mountain village called Truchas by an artist friend, who was born in Costa Rica and was raised in Los Angeles.  He served what he called posole.  Rich, succulent, delicious, it did what stews are supposed to do.  The ingredients turned the cooking liquid into ambrosia, yet the underlying  flavor of lime-processed corn and oregano was unmistakable.

So I asked for the recipe, which I received, that very night, but only as a list of ingredients.  No amounts.  No prep instructions.  Still, I knew where I was coming from (the traditional method) and where I wanted to go (my friend’s creative, unlabored approach), so I went to work right away.  By Christmas I could serve my ver- sion of my friend’s version to my family, who converge annually on Santa Fe for skiing and hanging out.  They loved it, and they continue to opt for seconds, every year, except when I get carried away with the super hot chilis.  One year I made the posole so hot even I couldn’t handle it without ladling it over an equivalent amount of bland white rice. 

Anyhow, here’s how it goes, with a bow to Alvaro Cardona-Hines:

Figure on two pounds of stewing pork.  Have on hand a 13 ounce can of diced tomatoes and a 13 ounce can of hominy, preferably Mexican style.  (You can start by soaking the chicos overnight, just as you can soak navy beans for baked beans, and you’ll get a chewier version, but my picky food-loving family doesn’t think this element of authenticity is worth the extra fuss). You will need a cup and a half of the following very coarsely sliced/diced vegetables: onions, carrots, celery, green  peppers.  Ditto with the mushrooms.  For spicing: oregano, bay leaf, black pepper, garlic, hot chilies.  As for liquid, you can stick with water, in which case the stew will be infinitely better on day two, or you can use chicken stock, which, in its commercial versions, is hardly better than water.

Chop and fry the onions in olive oil (or canola or peanut—whatever you want) as you see to the left.  Before they are too transparent, add the pork and stir the mixture from time to time.  Once the pork is mostly white on the outside, add the carrots and the other vegetables.  Add the hominy and tomatoes.  Add 2 bay leaves, 1 tablespoon of oregano, 1 teaspoon of chopped garlic, ½ teaspoon black pepper and fresh green chilies enough for the burn you can stand.  Stir.  Cover with water or chicken broth.  Simmer for two hours, adding liquid, if necessary. Correct seasonings, adding salt if you insist. 

Serve the posole with corn bread and a green salad—and who cares if it’s authentic?  It’s delicious.  And it freezes well.  Make it for yourself and you won’t have to cook for two weeks.

* By Jim Douglass, Santa Fe, 1977.

    

 

Back to the Future -Revisiting the US, Russian dialog

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I spent Wednesday afternoon at the Wilson Center at “Dialogue, Defense and Media Messaging: US-Russian Citizen Diplomacy Past and Present,“ a Kennan Institute program devoted to US-Russian relations from the standpoint of the people, the media, the desire to avoid nuclear holocaust and the signing of the New START. A substantial portion of the two and one-half hour event consisted of retelling and revisiting the past, a past that is, that began in 1985 with an all but forgotten “Citizen’s Summit” called a “Spacebridge.

This electronic bridge linked, by satellite, audiences in Seattle and what was then Leningrad and consisted of two separate Q and A sessions jointly moderated by larger than life American journalist and former NBC television host Phil Donahue and Soviet counterpart Vladimir Pozner.

Donahue was at the Wilson Center event on Wednesday and in excellent form. Pozner was supposed to have been there too – but the Icelandic volcanic eruption not the long disappeared Iron Curtain– kept him home in Moscow. To compensate, he participated live on camera – in a kind of contemporary give and take version of the Spacebridge.

Much as it would have been nice to have seen him there in the flesh, the Skype-kind of dialogue did work – and especially so for a back-to-the-future event rife with historical comparison, archival clips and an exploration of its meaning in context of the times. The event itself was conceived of by Ellen Messinger, producer of Global Pulse at Link TV in San Francisco. The timing could not have been better.

The almost forgotten Spacebridge

To tell the truth, I had almost forgotten about the Spacebridge – an early form of US-Soviet citizen-to-citizen diplomacy brought about through the very latest technology then available. It signaled the beginning of the Gorbachev era policy of glasnost (transparency) in Soviet politics and occurred before another kind of person-to-person bridge - the Reagan-Gorbachev Summit in Reykjavik in September 1986. In fact, according to Pozner, had Gorbachev not personally sanctioned the Spacebridge, it would not have happened and certainly would never have aired on Soviet national television as it did.

The Spacebridge - although dropped by NBC because it did not command the Neilsen ratings needed to keep it on the air (Donahue wryly characterized American interest in their Soviet counterparts as tepid) - nevertheless performed a useful function in breaking down national stereotypes, misperceptions and lowering heated Cold War era barriers between the two countries and peoples.

Diplomacy Lite, Military Heavy

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Why is American foreign policy so diplomatically light but so militarily heavy? No, I’m not imagining things. And it’s been that way for decades – George W. Bush and Dick Cheney just pushed the envelope further in that direction after 9/11.

Yet this is a fundamental question that Americans should not only be asking, but also attempting to resolve because diplomatic solutions, negotiations and conflict management are far less expensive (listen up Teapotter conservatives who long for small government and a miniscule federal budget – except, of course, for the military, roads and their Medicare and VA benefits), certainly less lethal, normally more effective with the neighbors and often just plain good foreign relations common sense.

Not always that way

According to University of Wisconsin history professor Jeremy Suri, it wasn’t always that way. The shift in emphasis came at the end of World War II with the advent of America's anti-Communism policy of Containment and the National Security Act of 1947. The Act restructured – and greatly strengthened – the US military but, as Suri points out, nothing of the sort was created to counterbalance its effects on US foreign policy at the State Department.

The way the Cold War was conceptualized in the US, America tilted heavily towards reliance on preponderant military strength. This was also used as a way to persuade the American public to and sell the US Congress on support for a policy weighted towards consequent military growth.

One also has to wonder, however, whether at the time the alternative would have been a retreat into the equally misguided isolationism of Jesse Helms and if the Containment policy wasn't partially, at least, designed as a counter-balance. Then, of course, Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt came along which damaged not only American universities, intellectuals, and the entertainment industry but also the State Department decimating the ranks of the China hands who, because they predicted Mao's victory, were somehow blamed for it.

Regardless, as a part of the Containment policy, Suri argues that entering into negotiations was too often considered from the position of overwhelming strength – yet, as we should recognize today – and should have recognized from our own earlier history – the application of preponderant military strength is often not the solution to non-military problems particularly in countries and regions located at the end of our supply chain with cultures and ambitions we do not understand.

The Subtle Season

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A conifer forest doesn’t change much from month to month.  The snow falls.  The snow melts.  Trails get muddy.  They dry up.  Sometimes the sky beyond is a cheery blue.  Dismal gray is also possible.  The lichen on rocks is alive, pale green rosettes clinging to pink granite all year round, but a colony of lichen grows so slowly that visible change has to be measured in years.  There’s nothing new to note as the days lengthen.

The piñons and junipers that make up our high desert forests at these middling elevations don’t crowd one another.  Each needs room to slurp up a decent share of the precipitation that arrives as rain or snow.  That means there’s room for sun-loving plants to make themselves at home.

Last weekend I noticed that tiny ruffles of green are poking through the dry brown tufts that mark where flowers were last summer.  By June the hills will be dotted with yellow and purple composites whose names I have never mastered.  In June the yucca will be sending up stalks of waxy lily-like flowers, and the prickly pears will be blooming, too.  These cactus flowers remind me crocuses.  That or demi tasse cups.  When the sun shines through their translucent yellow or vermillion petals, they are ethereally lovely.

It took me a few years to understand how succulents respond to spring.  During the winter they tend to look dry and shrunken, as if they are dying if not already done for.  Then, suddenly, the cactus pads are plumping up, and the yucca leaves are thickening, too.  They have made it through the winter.

Down in Santa Fe the fruit trees are blossoming now, especially the apricots, but spring takes its time in the hills.  Ten days ago I was still picking my way over white crystals for long stretches on the north-facing portions of the trail.  By this week the snow had been reduced to splotches here and there.  Where it has most recently melted away,  the trails are moist or even puddled, but the danger of slipping no longer comes from ice.  It’s loose gravel on dry steep slopes that has to be watched out for. 

You’d think that this transitional season would make for a pretty boring walk, visually, but that’s far from the case.  The charm of incipient spring in these hills is both subtle and dramatic.   I found myself stopping repeatedly to study the angular abstractions of criss-crossing piñon branches dead or alive, to appreciate the newly filled out look of yucca or cholla thriving among rocks, to trace the amoeboid shapes of  persistent patches of snow. 

Above all I basked in the benign sun and reveled in the feel of warm but gusty wind on bare skin. No coat.  No gloves.  No hat.  Maybe that’s the best part of early spring. 

The Broom’s April Check Up

By Patricia H. Kushlis

It’s been two months since I wrote "Large Broom Still Needed" a post that focused on a number of serious endemic administrative deficiencies that adversely affect the operation of the State Department. These deficiencies result in a far less effective institution than it could, should and needs to be if it is going to play the leading role in this country’s national security apparatus that the Obama administration and Secretaries Clinton and Gates want.

Easter has come and gone so I thought that it was time to check back to see what and whether anything had changed on the management front in the interim.

The first thing I discovered was that one of the personnel practices I cited as a problem in my "System in Need of a Large Broom" post last December -- the hiring of certain individuals by bypassing normal procedures -- had made its way into The Washington Post. Citing the case of Reta Lewis -- described by the Post as a "veteran lobbyist" -- the article made reference to Lewis' improper hiring through the Schedule B mechanism. Now Hillary is entitled to hire the people she knows and trusts -- all Secretaries have that right.

But she got bad advice from someone in her HR office about this one and it went public. In fact, State's personnel problems seem to be leaking out into the open with some regularity. The Town Hall meeting in January where three different people brought up personnel issues, an article in the LA Times about discrimination against African-Americans March 16, 2010 -- you get the picture.

Bottom Line: Little or Nothing has Changed

The Department still has no Inspector General – the acting Deputy IG – a retired Foreign Service Officer and old friend of the Under Secretary for Management -- is still in place drawing both his full retirement pay plus full senior officer salary. Furthermore, the relationship between State’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Human Resources allegedly continues to remain too cozy.

The Civil Service Ombudsman position remains empty – as it has for some time - despite the Civil Service union representative’s poignant appeal to Hillary in a Town Meeting on January 26 to name an appropriate person to fill it. At that time, the Under Secretary for Management responded that filling the vacancy was being worked on.

From what I understand, it still must be in the construction stage.

Greenland, Many Icebergs, Two Muskoxen and the Midnight Sun

By Linda Bigelow, Guest Contributor

Linda Bigelow is a free-lance photographer who relishes off-the beaten-path travel. When not on the road, she and her husband Lee live in St. Jeannet, France. This photo story is from their trip to Greenland, June 4-23, 2009.  Text and photo credits:  Linda Bigelow.

Lee awakened me with one word: “Icebergs!”

We were two nights into a magical voyage on the Sarfaq Ittuk, a once-a-week ferry that serves Greenland’s West Coast. After departing from Nuuk, Greenland's capital, we stopped briefly at small settlements on the way to the town of Ilulissat and its famous ice fjord. We had crossed the Arctic Circle the day before and were definitely in the “land of the Midnight Sun.”

Clouds hung low over the Davis Strait and formed halos around the black granite, coastal mountains. The spotting of battleship-like icebergs signaled our approach to the ice fjord. Our captain skillfully wove a delicate path through the massive icebergs and the slush until we reached the mouth of the Ilulissat harbor. (photo right).

Ilulissat

In Ilulissat we stayed at a hostel (photo left), converted from a workers barracks and operated by World of Greenland, which had just reopened for the season. A bit frayed at the edges, it was nonetheless clean and functional. My husband Lee and I had a tiny room with bunks, table, two chairs, and small closet. Bathrooms and a well-equipped kitchen were down the hall. Perfect! We cooked nearly all our meals, as did the few other international guests, all of them friendly and considerate.

Ilulissat's number one attraction is the Kangerlua ice fjord (designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004). (photo left). We hiked about 30 minutes over a granite ridge via well-marked trails to reach it. Crossing over the ridge, the ice fjord spreads out into an array of massive, blue-green-white, floating ice sculptures. Loud cracks, creaks, and groans split the air like thunder. Somewhere an iceberg has broken apart, releasing cascades of water and an avalanche of ice and slush into the fjord. (photo right: Walk to the Ice Fjord) People are warned not to walk along the edge of the fjord, because these events create mini-tsunamis. (A number of tourists have been swept away and drowned.)

From the top of the ridge, we saw the breakup of an iceberg, the powerful gush of water, the avalanches, and the mini-tsunami. We also heard the thunderous noise; and, best of all, recorded it. We were awestruck. Back at the hostel, the manager said these events are only seen about every six years. We were lucky. (photo right:  Greenland landscape.)

Icebergs That Hang Out in the Kangerlua Ice Fjord

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