WhirledView

David Brooks' Romanticized Dream that Never Was

By Patricia H Kushlis

New York Times columnist David Brooks must have read James Billington’s Icon and the Ax: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture during summer vacation.  The book was a classic in its field and remained so for years after it was first published in 1966.

In his column “The Russia I Miss” on September 11, 2015, Brooks decries the loss of a Russian counterculture based on the vision of the Russian soul with its roots in the visuality of Russian Orthodoxy and the simple, monotonous lifestyle and superstitious mentality of the Russian peasant.

Brooks argues that although Russia has become a more normal country since 1991 it has lost this unique vantage point so integral to the vibrant intellectual and cultural life that began with its largely French speaking aristocracy as depicted by Leon Tolstoy in his mid-19th century novels and ended with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn who fled to a Vermont farm in the late 1970s to escape the final years of the Communist system with his portrayals of the Gulag.

But there are serious fallacies with Brooks’ romanticized dream of a time that never existed. 

Much of Russia’s literary and cultural brilliance came in reaction to a lengthy history of authoritarianism and at its peak lasted for a matter of decades not centuries. It originated in response to the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, the subsequent rise of nationalisms throughout Eastern Europe and the spread of Czarist government-financed industrialization which only came to Russia in the late nineteenth century - as the Czar’s response to the rise of the German economic juggernaut.  At its height, this Russian counterculture corresponded to a brief period of history that occurred prior to and during the country’s late economic development concentrated around Moscow and St. Petersburg, the political revolts of 1905 and 1917 and tardy exploration and penetration of the empire's vast hinterlands.  (Photo left:  Marc Chagall's Gates to the Jewish Cemetery, 1917 by PH Kushlis 2003.)

Yes, this cultural renaissance was unique because it blended East and West in ways not seen or experienced before.  But it was also the product of the influence of European thought on Russia’s tiny aristocratic class and its small but growing urban population that had unleashed the driving force of nationalism throughout the continent.

The Czar’s belated attempts at reformation in order to rescue a weak, pre-industrial multinational empire from encroachment by an economically strong Germany had produced a radicalized labor force concentrated in Russia’s two major cities, a small westernized bourgeoisie with, ironically, Old Believer roots whose factories and impressive collections of impressionist art had tremendous impact on the Russian cultural scene at the time. 

Russian culture then burrowed underground or fled abroad after Stalin’s ascent to the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and his clamp down on dissent and artistic expression thereafter.

The scarcities of the Communist era - foremost imposed by a utopian and unworkable economic system - turned everyone into criminals.  Life revolved around transactions of the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” variety.  The spirit of the Russian soul which Brooks so longs for had no part of it. 

Meanwhile, Russian composers - like their European counterparts - were mining melodies, harmonies, rhythms and story lines - from the folk songs and peasant cultures that stretched across the vast empire which ethnographers and ethno-musicologists uncovered on field trips throughout the countryside.   These often formed the bases for Russia’s greatest music just as they did Finland’s, Norway’s, Poland’s, and Hungary’s among others.

As for Russia’s lack today of not having a single university among the world’s top 100 today, when did it ever have a university with such stature?  Or did I miss something?    Certainly specific departments and individual professors - like Moscow State University’s theoretical mathematics department - did have stellar reputations and world class scholars. But even during Soviet and Czarist times, Russian tertiary education from the arts through the military was conducted in specialized institutes and academies - not universities - that normally led to professions or skilled jobs as apportioned and decided upon by the state.

Or today, as occurred in pre-Revolutionary Russia, some children of the elite went to Europe for advanced education as did the scions of other Europeanized and Asian elites from around the world.   They now also study in the US because, well, that's where more than a few of the world's 100 best universities are located.  They may or may not return home depending on how they are treated. 

So please, Mr. Brooks, let’s not get carried away by what never was. Much less what never will be.

   

"Tangerines" : It’s the Russians, Stupid

A Film Review

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The orchard of tangerines never gets harvested.  That’s the way it is with war.  People die, and the beautiful things go to waste.  

Tangerines, a cinematic collaboration between Estonia and Georgia, with additional support from the European Union, is very very political.  And yet, the first time I saw  it, the political content was nearly obscured by the deep humanity of it, the hauntingly apt and spare  dialog, the extraordinarily sensitive acting by an all male cast and the exquisite pathos of the last scene which produces a heart-wrenching click!   We learn why Ivo has clung so tenaciously to his patch of Abkhazia.

Yes, the film is set in that tiny “nation” on the shores of the Black Sea, one of the ethnic enclaves that Vladimir Putin pried loose from Georgia, just as he is now subverting as much of Ukraine as he can, en route to restoring the imperial reach of the Soviet Union. It took a mini war to detach Abkhazia from Georgia.  Tangerines illustrates the divide-and-conquer tactics and the human cost of making ex-satellites pay for the temerity of refusing close association with Russia once they have a choice of allies. The film is sub-titled in English.  The actual dialogue shifts from Russian to Estonian to Chechen to Georgian, depending on who is speaking to whom, although Russian is the only universally shared tongue for all these products of Moscow-imposed  Tsarist and Soviet rule.  

Here’s the little known fact around which the story is built: for nearly 100 years there was a distinctive pocket of Estonians in Abkhazia.  When Russia forced a war on Georgia in 1992, most of them packed up and left for a free, democratic, post-Soviet Estonia.  The film’s narrative is built around three elderly Estonians who remain behind: Margus, an orchard-owner who needs to get his tangerines picked and sold before he can afford to leave; a physician who is scheduled to rejoin his wife and children in Estonia within days; and Ivo, friend and neighbor to Margus.  Ivo, a tangerine crate maker, refuses to leave his land for deep private reasons he declines to divulge until that last scene.  The three Estonians live in a remote, almost idyllic valley, staying in touch with the world via radio.  They are acutely aware that hot war at its worst could  could barrel down the spring-muddy road any day, any hour.

And so it does: a fire fight between six Georgians in a van and two jeep-driving Chechen mercenaries fighting for Russia.  Two men survive: a sassy young Georgian and a gruff, middle-aged Chechen, both obsessed with honor.  Ivo and Margus bury the dead, carry the wounded men into Ivo’s house and fetch their doctor friend, who manages to save two lives despite horrible wounds.  When the two men stagger weakly to their feet again, what they most want is revenge.  They want to kill one another.

And they would have, except for one thing.  They owe their lives to Ivo, who lays down the law. No killing under my roof.  How can they, honorably, object?

Time goes by.  Tea is drunk.  Simple meals are shared.  Everyone listens to the radio.  Niko and Ahmed get stronger.  And little by little a human miracle happens.  The Georgian and the Chechan begin to feel a certain warmth toward one another, a certain sense of being brothers in the home of Ivo, their spiritual father/grandfather.  Eventually it becomes clear that they will not kill one another. Not in the house. Not outdoors.

But the outside world has not progressed so beneficently.   Heavily armed, belligerent militias arrive.  Georgians.  Abkhazians.  None with an axe to grind against the unimportant Estonians.  All ready to kill their ethnic enemies.  Each militia is cleverly dispatched. The odd family of four manipulate supposedly fixed identities so that no one needs to be surrendered, no one needs to be shot.  A new world has been created, one in which all men are kin.

And then comes a Russian patrol. The Russians pick a fight with Ahmed, the Chechan, unwilling to believe that this unlikely resident of a run down Estonian bungalow has fought on their side.  They’re about to execute  him when Niko, the Georgian, watching from behind a curtain, decides it’s time to grab the guns Ivo has stashed away.  Rapid crossfire ensues.  Niko is killed.  So is Margus.  And so are all the Russians.  (Good riddance, from the point of view of the Estonian and Georgian producers, who thus finger the real villains of the war!)

And so much for paradise on earth.  

The last moments of the film present us with a burial scene on a knoll overlooking the Black Sea.  Ivo and Ahmed are laying Niko to rest beside Ivo’s son, who (we now learn) was killed in the first days of the war.  We don’t know for sure who killed him.  Probably Georgians.  It doesn’t really matter.  Dead is dead. And Ivo clearly has no intention of abandoning the land that holds his son.

Ahmed is touched.  “You bury this Georgian next to your own son?” he asks, in amazement.  “And if I were in Niko’s place?”  Ivo smiles and says, “The same, but a few feet further away.”  Ahmed, after all, is Muslim, not Christian.  Ahmed smiles, a wonderful, crinkly-eyed smile on a battered, stubbly Chechen face, a smile full of a son's affection for an elderly father.

So Tangerines is a very political film, but it is more important than that.  It is a very  powerful anti-war film.  
   



 
 

Tragedy in Ice Blue: Leviathan is Hardly a “Good” Fight

By Patricia H Kushlis

Years ago when I was visiting Finnish Lapland over Easter vacation, the color of ice blue dominated land and sky.  The horizons were immense.  The terrain was flat, little vegetation grew to obscure the earth’s austere Arctic vastness and the sun – a fiery orange ball on the horizon at dusk – already set late in the evening.  The ubiquitous Lapland mosquitos, however, had yet to appear.  

It’s been a long time since a Russian film took prizes in international film festivals.  This must be the first to have been set in Teriberka, a small fishing village near Murmansk on the Barents Sea close to where Russia’s Kola Peninsula and Norway meet. Further north than the upper reaches of Finland or Sweden. (film poster photo via Wikipedia)

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker reviewed the film in January.  The review’s title, a review which began with Lane’s views on another film entitled “Two Days, One Night” was “Good Fights.”  But was “Leviathan” really a good fight?  Not from what I saw.  It pitted a poor schmuck against the powers of a thoroughly corrupted state embodied in the village’s corpulent mayor seated in front of a picture of Putin acting in cahoots with its sanctimonious Russian Orthodox priest.   

That same ice blue dominates the background of the recent Cannes award winning Russian film “Leviathan.”  I saw it via the Internet at a friends’ house just a few weeks ago.  I don’t think “Leviathan” has made it to the local art cinemas here yet in Santa Fe – but I could be wrong.

"Leviathan" is at its simplest the tragic story of a poor Russian mechanic wrongly accused and convicted of a death that he did not commit so that the entrenched powers – the mayor and the village priest - could steal his house, tear it down and confiscate the land on which it stood for their own venal purposes. One of those purposes was a church, the other was a hotel.  The film’s title, of course, comes from the book of Deuteronomy or the Tanakh.  In it, Leviathan is a huge sea-creature or sea-monster. The monster appears in the film as the bleached bones of a large whale washed ashore on the beach where the mechanic’s wife commits suicide. 

What makes this film different from those of the Communist period – and even a powerful movie like “Burnt by the Sun” made in its aftermath – is its visual window dressing, not the underlying depiction of power and its excesses.  That was always there.  Yes, the characters dressed like they belonged to the 21^st century and drove newly minted western vehicles.  But the scenes could have been filmed years before – just substitute the Communist Party’s First Secretary for the Orthodox priest - and the result would have been the equivalent. 

It’s no wonder that this film was effectively barred from the Russian public – with the exception of a single showing in a small cinema in St. Petersburg - because it is highly critical of the way Russia is ruled today from top to bottom.  Yes, many ambiguities are there but this one takes little imagination to see.

What is surprising is that “Leviathan” received partial funding from the Russian Ministry of Culture and that the Russian authorities allowed it to compete in prestigious international film festivals.  It is also a surprise that director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s inspiration for this film came not from Russia but from an incident in Colorado which drew the director’s attention.  It is less of a surprise that this film can be seen in a more universal context:  the excesses of uncontrolled capitalism working in tandem with corrupt state religion – each propping up the other. 

In a sense, “Leviathan” is a throw-back to the centuries of Tsarist Russia when the state controlled religion and religion kept Russian subjects in line through threats of the fear of a vengeful God.  The vast majority of them were indentured serfs until 1861 – then during the Communist era the peasants were chained to the “kolkhoz” or collective farm – and under Stalin, the “rich” ones were murdered - so there wasn’t much difference. 

There’s a scene in the film where teenage boys from the village are found around a camp fire set in the ruins of an old orthodox church outside of town.  Given the strong use of symbolism throughout the movie, I assume this scene is also meant to be symbolic but of what I’m unsure.  Irreverence for religion? The irrelevance of religion to today’s youth?  Or maybe not.

"Leviathan" moves at far less than lightning speed but the action builds block by block, scene by scene.  It provokes thought:  its messages and images churn in the brain well after the theater lights have been turned on.   Isn’t that – in the end - the gold standard for a lasting film or a play?       

Religio-Cultural Nationalism & Valentine’s Day in Delhi: Not Really So Funny

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Lodi Garden is not a manicured place.  Its ambient vegetation is Delhi’s scrubby woodland, the scrappy growth that springs back after a dose of over-civilization.  But there are lawns, too, stubbly grassy expanses to play cricket on, to picnic and  lounge on, under a pleasant winter sun.  Picture also meandering pathways bordered here and there with Delhi’s favorite cold season flowers—marigolds, calendulas, dahlias.  Finally, as if to add a bit of fantasy or morbid reality, there are the elegant tombs that give this delicious garden its anchoring in history, one for Muhammad Shah (1434-45) of the Sayyid dynasty, another for the eponymous Sikander Lodi (1489-1570), not to mention intimate little mosques and a stone bridge that once spanned a Moghul irrigation canal and now ornaments a lake.  Very romantic.  

So romantic that young lovers lurk everywhere in the gaze-confounding, identity-obscuring dappled shade.  They cuddle on well-shaded park benches.  They sit side by side, dangling their legs over the lake.  They stroll on path and off path.  One guide book calls Lodi Garden a lover’s lane, an understatement, if anything.  

The system works like this: parents assume their normally well-watched offspring are safely enclosed in classrooms at one of Delhi’s many colleges or universities, but school days are also days of escape from parental control.  India’s future doctors, lawyers and teachers, like most students everywhere, are rabid for experience in—ahem!—life as well as book learning. The educational process is subversive in more than one way.

Many Delhi students are commuters, so the pairing up potential drops drastically on weekends, which did not bode well for the romance industry this year.  Valentine’s Day would be falling on a Saturday.  Sales might be very disappointing.  Still an effort had to be made.   Red, pink, violet—hearts ballooned and blossomed everywhere.  Pasted on windows.  Dangling from ceilings. Iced on cakes.  Adorning heart-shaped boxes of chocolates.  Every stationary store featured I-love-you cards and e-cards were no doubt ready for sweethearts’ in-boxes, though I didn’t actually check that out.  The modern celebration of  St. Valentine’s Day is rooted in Christian tradition, but why shouldn’t the chubby image of Cupid or Eros be welcome in India, and why shouldn’t parks be full of lovers, given the frankly erotic imagery of some Hindu temples?  And surely the stories of Krishna and Radha aren’t cherished purely for their spiritual symbolism.

But every culture has its prudes and purists aka fundamentalists who devote themselves to sucking the romance out of life.  What’s more, Indian cultural nationalists, such as the Hindu Mahasabha, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Shiv Sena  and related groups, refuse to see any agreeable convergences between East and West, which, to their everlasting despair, have indeed met and melded in many ways, bringing yoga and gurus to America, Dominos pizza and Valentine’s Day to India.  This year, emboldened perhaps by the religiosity and Hindu extremist origins of the current Prime Minister, mobs of saffron shirts (or should I say kurtas) were determined to snuff out all manifestations of Western decadence.  Love isn’t just for a day, they sniffed.  It’s for every day, but only for those who are properly married.   

How silly!  Or was it?

And so, they announced, they’d be forming shaadi or marriage squads tasked with swooping down on unwed hand holders come Valentine’s Day to perform the rite that would legalize their impious amorousness.  No kidding!  A self-appointed religious police force—and this wasn’t Saudi Arabia or even Pakistan. I had flashbacks to my years in Karachi, during which salafist-oriented Islamists often threatened violence to eliminate music and dance as well as Valentine’s Day from the lives of the young.  As a result, anything like culture had gone mostly underground.  But in cosmopolitan Delhi these threats seemed quite funny.  Given the need for a sacred fire and spoonfuls of goopy ghee at traditional Hindu marriages, how the deed would be done? With a cigarette lighter, perhaps?    

In fact, the forced marriage threats weren’t  funny.  They’re part of a very dangerous pattern that’s been emerging since the BJP’s huge parliamentary victory somewhat less than a year ago.  The threatened anti-Valentine’s Day brigades in Delhi were one more manifestation of the tolerance for intolerance that has been unleashed since the BJP’s Narendra Modi became Prime Minister.

Reconversion and Church Burning

Reconversion efforts, for instance, are underway.  Chalk up the score!  So many Christians recovered for Hinduism.  So many Buddhists.  So many Muslims.  All without duress.  Supposedly.  But no one believes that helpless poor minorities in remote villages are renouncing their deepest religious convictions voluntarily.  Meanwhile, attacks on Christians, sporadic in the past, or localized, as in Odisha for spell in the 1990s, have increased, too.  In Delhi, in particular,  the number of churches looted, vandalized and/or burnt in recent months has been shocking.  Worse, it’s a phenomenon that was for months shockingly ignored by top authorities.  The newspapers did their job.  The incidents were reported.  Photos were published.  Victims were quoted.  But from the office of Prime Minister Narendra Modi: silence.   Modi did not utter a single word condemning the outbreak of dangerous communalism in the nation’s capital.  He did nothing to stop it.  

Capriol for your 2014 Holidays Listening Pleasure

By Patricia H Kushlis

In October 1926 Philip Arnold Heseltine, publishing under the nom de plume of Peter Warlock, composed a set of six dances called "Capriol" based – likely loosely - on Renaissance dances from Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchesographie, a manual of Renaissance tunes also published the same year.  Drawn to the study of Renaissance music himself as well as much drink and sex, Heseltine’s own life was certainly  as bawdy and out of control as "Bransles" and “Matachins” (The Sword Dance)” but perhaps also at times as soothing, smooth and sensuous as “Pavane” and “Pieds en l’air.” 

Heseltine likely chose the pseudonym of Peter Warlock for his compositions because of his fascination with the occult retaining Heseltine for music criticism and other writings.

He dedicated "Capriol" to the Breton composer Paul Ladmirault.  Heseltine first wrote the suite for piano duet then later scored it for string and full orchestras. Warlock as Heseltine conducted the "Capriol Suite" at a Proms Concert in 1929, the “single public conducting engagement of his life.”   

"Capriol" was transcribed for wind ensemble by Martin Tousignant in 2006. Each dance is brief. The suite in its entirety runs for just over 10 minutes. The movements are entitled: 1. Basse-Dance; 2. Pavane; 3. Tordion; 4. Bransles; 5. Pieds-en-l'air; and 6. Mattachins. 

The Santa Fe Concert Band performed five of "Capriol’s" six dances in its holiday concerts December 13 and 15, 2014.

  

Here is an engaging performance of "Capriol" by the Norwegian String Orchestra for your holiday listening pleasure. 

         

Introverts Aren’t Losers: Re-reading Haruki Murakami’s Latest

A Review Article

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Prisms turn a beam of  colorless light into a full color spectrum. Sunshine in.  Red/orange/yellow/green/blue/violet out.  A rain- bow! No one who learns to do this in junior high science forgets the magic of it.  

Well, hardly anyone forgets, unless they become literary critics, it seems.  None of the reviewers I’ve encountered caught what’s largely at play in Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.  They've tended to see the hero as a pathetic loser, which is almost excusable.  Murakami, in his usual devious way, leads us into this trap.  Even the hero of his tale has difficulty grasping the wonder of his own talent, which takes the  form of engineering efficient railroad stations.  He may be a level-headed, practical man of science, but people depend on him to get where they want to go safely and on time.  What’s pathetic about that?  Especially considering the importance of railroads in Japan.  Bullet trains anyone?

The novel’s set up involves a group of five young people who eventually attend the same public high school in the suburbs of Nagoya.   This group of inseparable friends includes two other boys, one named Akamatsu, which means Red Pine, the other named Oumi or Blue Sea.  The two girls are sisters, Shirane or White Root and Kurono or Black Field.  The latter names seem to be outliers at first, but they are tricks of light as dramatically in tension as the notions of colorful and colorless.  One expects such modulations/complications from Murakami.

As for Tsukuru, he received from his father a curious name that means “create” in Chinese characters or “make/build,” in simpler Japanese characters, the variant deemed by papa to be less “burdensome” as a name for his son, whatever that means.  Looking back at his childhood, Tsukuru isn’t sure.  As a boy and young man, however, he fears that he is “the only one of the group [of friends] without anything special about him.”  Ao is much smarter.  Oumi is a terrific athlete. The girls are talented and beautiful.  As for Tsukuru, he views himself as a colorless,    middling sort of guy, smart but not brilliant, decent-looking yet far from film star handsome, no sportsman but not a klutz either.  Oh yes!  As a child, he liked to play with trains, a boyish obsession that turns into a profession demanding resourcefulness as well as calculation.   

Meanwhile, although the young Tsukuru often wonders why his colorful friends put up with him, he revels in the reliability of their mutual loyalty, which seems to endure even after they graduate from high school, when Tsukuru is the only one to continue his studies.  Leaving the others to do what they can in Nagoro, Tsukuru follows an engineering curriculum in  Tokyo, returning periodically to visit his widowed mother and enjoy his friends.  And then, horrors!  During a routine visit, he’s informed that none of his friends want anything to do with him anymore.  No visits. No phone calls.  No explanations.  The long expected has actually happened.   His colorful friends have  rejected him.  He falls into a debilitating depression, and his social life in Tokyo is too meager to compensate.  

Worse, the one girl who interests him won’t get serious until he returns to Nagoro and solves the  mystery behind the wall of silence.  Forced into a face to face session, Ao spills the beans.  The neurotic “black” girl, having returned from a trip to Tokyo, had told her friends that Tsukuru had raped her.  Ao admits that it was hard to visualize Tsukuru as a rapist, but the girl’s mental health was too fragile for argument.  They had to pamper her, he says, although their loyalty couldn’t protect her from being murdered some time later by an intruder in her own apartment.  This is tragic news for Tsukuru, but it’s also heartening news: he himself hasn’t been rejected—and he has made another important discovery.  His colorful old pals, while succeeding up to a point, aren’t exactly making history.  They certainly aren’t doing any better than he is.

In the closing chapters Murakami tips his hand less ambiguously than usual.  The best scene finds Tsukuru sitting on a bench, one of many along the platform of an important station.  He's watching the arrival and departure of trains, the ebb and flow of people.  Like a poet rereading one of his own very good poems, Tsukuru takes quiet satisfaction in what he does so well.  He also feels the drama and romance of the travel that he makes possible for people with errands and dreams.  No, Tsukuru is not flamboyant.  He’ll never be colorful. But he’s colorless as white light is: complete, integrated, whole.

Realizing this (though never is so many words), he’s ready to pursue the woman who wasn’t ready for him, which doesn’t mean she’ll accept him.  Murakami isn’t going to give us such easy satisfaction.  Nevertheless,  Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage isn’t the story of a dorky sad sack.  It’s a success story.  And his pilgrimage?  It’s a journey to self-understanding and self-acceptance.  

Why did so many American critics fail to see this?   Partly, I think, it’s because Murakami slyly invites the derogatory interpretation.  He depicts Tsukuru as thoroughly brainwashed into believing that only flamingly colorful extroversion is real personality.  But mostly, I believe, the critical blindness stems from the deeply-ingrained American preference for extroverts, a phenomenon that is brilliantly examined by Susan Cain in her recent book entitled  Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.  Even in intellectual circles, evidently,  there’s little appreciation for quiet accomplishment.  

Fulbright, International Exchanges and the Annual Budget Wars

Sound the alarm.  Call the troops to the battlefield of the annual budget wars currently underway in Washington. Here’s just one example: a poignant but less than fully historically accurate plea by a journalist on the program’s behalf. This year the venerable Fulbright program for academics and scholars is under threat of a 13% cut from Congress.  How can such a dramatic reduction be endured?

Chances are good that there will be a reduction of funds for the program but not by 13 percent because, you see, the Fulbright program benefits American scholars and students as well as foreign ones. American Fulbright alumni, their universities, the Board of Foreign Scholarships, the overseas Commissions, and IIE, the agency that operates the program under contract to the State Department here in the US, are being summoned to sound the clarion call to lobby Congress on the program’s behalf. 

The Key to Roll-Back

This US government supported program is one of the few international exchanges of people with dedicated and appreciative American alumni who can be reliably called upon to defend it before Congress time and time again. They are articulate, involved and concerned citizens. They also vote.

Yet a 13% cut, is not draconian – despite what its staunch program defenders argue.  The program has suffered far worse cuts in the past and survived – including a reduction of 28% in FY 1996 – after the US had decided that history had ended, it didn’t need to engage publics abroad, educate its own citizens about the world beyond its borders, or even have an agency that effectively administered US information and cultural programs overseas.

I remember it too well because I was Branch Chief for European Academic Exchanges in the then US Information Agency at the time. Not only was the European budget for Fulbright by far the largest Fulbright program budget in the world but European governments – especially, but not just Germany - were the most responsive in supporting the program with their own public and private sector funds – as I would guess and hope they still are.

Since far more Americans would prefer a Fulbright experience in Europe and European governments are the most financially and administratively supportive, it’s no surprise then that the European program has had by far the largest staff as well as budget for years.  I suspect that’s still the case.

The problem is, however, that as much as I support the Fulbright program, one that I defended and administered in the US and overseas throughout my 27 plus year Foreign Service career – particularly since Fulbright is a real exchange (not just a one way program for foreigners to come to the US and spend a few weeks touring the country and meeting their counterparts) - there are other factors that need to be considered and questions that need to be asked and answered in the context of the international exchanges budget in the bureau as a whole.

Let's not forget that since 9/11, the budget for State’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs (ECA) has increased substantially more than just making up for the draconian cuts of the 1990s.

Now as the federal budget is again in a period of decline, what percentage of that decline affects the ECA bureau’s entire budget (don’t panic it’s been firewalled off from the overall State Department budget so funds from the Fulbright program cannot be diverted for use elsewhere in the department – or if that is happening just let me know and I too will sign the petition)?  Assuming, however, this is not the case, I would like to know whether Fulbright is being unduly penalized to cover increases in other ECA programs.   And if so why and which ones are among the more favored?

What is an exchange program:  one way or two?

I also support international youth exchanges which, for my money, are more cost effective and just as influential as Fulbright.  I think youth exchange should equally benefit American youth as well as foreigners – although with the exception of the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (which I worked on in its formative years and which exchanges American and German youth for an academic year of study and family stays in each other’s countries) – have not benefited American teens as much as they should have because the emphasis for all but CBYX especially since the take-over of the Bureau by the State Department has been on bringing foreigners here – not also helping to send American teens to study and live with host families abroad. 

Notes on the Olympics: Russia’s Caged Doves

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

It’s the traditional gesture, a feel good image with which to conclude an opening ceremony for the Olympic Games. We’ve seen it so many times: the dove of peace, tossed to the winds, flying free and out of sight. Peace and freedom. Goals all the more valuable for not being easy to attain.

And so, at the 22nd games in Sochi, Russia, after a dreary three hours of clever theater machinery used to ponderous, pretentious, discombobulated and at times historically dubious effect, it was time (at last) to close the business by releasing the dove of peace.

The vehicle was a ballet, its choreography crudely based on the dance form for which Russia is justly famous, and (inadvertently, I have to believe) this finale gave us (at last) a perfect illustration of today’s Russia. I wonder if this revelation was apparent, at the time or later, to Russian President Vladimir Putin who was, of course, in attendance. As for me, I can only wonder at how clever but blind choreographers can be.

Let me describe the costumes. Think of pale blue lampshades made entirely of fine long fringe-like strands. Fitting over the head, hanging down to the dancers’ knees, the apparatus was held in place by the dancers’ unseen arms. When the dancers twirled, the fringes flew out into daisy-like discs. Quite lovely actually. When the motion stopped, the fringes fell back, loosely, limply, almost completely concealing the forms of the dancers. And so, after some space-filling choreography, which is to say, after every few moments of exhilarating freedom, the doves were re- caged.

So sad. Too much like real life. But I kept my hopes up as the dance went on. Surely, I thought, as the dancers began to twirl again, these doves will escape. They will all go free.

Soon, indeed, the prima ballerina showed the way to liberation. Spinning, cage flying out and open, she allowed the lampshade apparatus to fall to her shoulders. Her beautiful face emerged, and the cage—how wonderful!—had turned into wings. She was free. She was liberated. I felt so happy for her and expected, in a moment, all the other doves to emerge. I’d see all their beautiful faces and they, too, would fly off on pale blue wings.

But no. When the music stopped and the twirling was over, the cages fell shut and all I could see were feet. In the end, only the prima ballerina was free to hold her head high, look us proudly in the eye and receive our applause.

Isn’t that a little like Russia today? Putin soars. Everyone else cowers.