“We have our thumbs on their jugular”

Someone once wrote an “interpretation” of diplomatic language: Example: “We had frank discussions” means “we have our thumbs on their jugular.”

Why is diplomacy so full of bland speech? Even hypocrisy? Answer: A frank assessment may shut down fruitful negotiations over delicate issues. Open agreements openly arrived at is an ideal that if literally carried out may result in zero agreements. Talks away from public scrutiny  may be necessary. Sometimes public announcements in which news is limited to those bland statements allow meaningful give and take to reach a compromise.

In negotiations when both sides want ninety percent, each will have to settle for less if they want to conclude an agreement. Naming your opponent an irresponsible egomaniac is unlikely to wring concessions from him. Bland speech may keep the negotiations going until a meaningful compromise is reached.

Not Even the British?

 

The leader of the writers’ symposium shook her head. “In pitches for your stories, you must compare your work to American authors.”

“Not even the British?” I asked. I had compared the current story I’m writing, part of a mystery series, to the novels of a couple of English mystery authors.

“Not even the British. Has to be American.”

The British, who practically invented the cozy mystery, who birthed Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, were not be mentioned in a pitch for a story? I guess not.

I should have been forewarned. Other times when I’ve pitched stories to editors or agents, I’ve seen them shake their heads. “The market for stories other than those with a domestic setting is slim.”

“Even with American characters?”

“Even with American characters.”

Growing up, I loved Kate Seredy’s stories of Hungarians. Others stories with Russian, French, German, Mexican, and of course British characters inhabited my childhood years. Granted, stories based in Africa or South America were rarely available in the public library of my childhood, but the global stories it held were favorites.

The United States is a large country. Like other large countries, such as India and Russia, we tend toward strong nationalism, toward an us and them outlook. Such nations develop strong creative impulses in literature, music, and art.

Yet, our ignorance of other countries and their cultures can lead to poor decisions in our relations with the world. The last war with Iraq is now considered a mistake by many Americans of both political parties.

To study other countries and read stories with international settings does not reflect poorly on the loyalty we have for our own accomplishments. In fact, one of the reasons for our country’s vitality is the stream of immigrants that flow into it from other cultures.

Most of us enjoy geography in music: a Polish polka, a German symphony, a Mexican dance, an African hymn. What about geography through fiction?

Social Security Versus Education?

 

In a column for The Seattle Times, Danny Westneat, 48, reminisced about his college days. It was possible in his college years, he said, to actually earn a year’s tuition to college with a summer job.

According to the columnist, in 1981, a year of tuition at the University of Washington was $687. Today, it’s $12,500. Part of the difference is that the government paid ninety percent of the tab in 1981. Today? Thirty percent. Westneat’s opinion is that his generation milked the system, but, having prospered from their education, aren’t interested in doing the same for the current generation.

Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, in their book That Used To Be Us, How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, question resources transferred from the nation’s youth to seniors since Social Security was established in the 1930’s. The authors state: “The national interest depends on everyone, including seniors, making some sacrifice so that the country can make the investments it needs in America’s future.”

We might also consider the money spent on the wars we have fought in the last few years. They have taken money that might have been used to better fund our pension system as well as pay more for education for our youth. Our military adventures that sent our young to war also robbed them of educational resources.

De-Americanization?

 

In the wake of budget troubles in the United States and the near collapse of the nation’s promise to pay its debts, China has suggested the “de-Americanization of the world.”

De-Americanization goes beyond economics. China, Russia, and other nations are questioning, not only the primacy of the U.S. dollar, but the rules set up by Western-oriented nations, including the United States. China bristles at any questioning of its internal affairs.

Should any nation have a right to interfere in the sovereign affairs of another nation over alleged human rights violations such as torture? In 1948, the United States, one of forty eight nations, voted in favor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among other issues, the declaration prohibits signatories from practicing torture, slavery, or prohibition of religious preferences.

Most Americans take for granted that certain practices are good: freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty of a crime, the right to peaceful assembly, and so on. At times we have fallen far short of what we profess. Nevertheless, we adhere in principle to basic human rights and have allied ourselves with European and other nations who believe similarly.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Middle East took center stage. China rose meteorically in economic realms. The Rwandan massacres of 1994 brought frustration. Foreign policy was challenged by drugs coming from southwest Asia and South America. India and Pakistan, two old enemies, one influenced by Hinduism and the other by Islam, faced off with nuclear weapons. A bit player, North Korea, boasts of nuclear weapons.

These new players on the world stage appear with less history of adherence to our professed beliefs. How do we live peacefully with them in the new global community? Where did our assumptions originate? If we deem them “good,” how is the best way to encourage them in cultures far different from our own?

Slow Fiction

 

You devour fast fiction as you do fast food. You savor slow fiction like you linger over an old-fashioned Sunday dinner with family and friends.

In her book, God’s Hotel, Victoria Sweet writes of “slow medicine,” medicine that allows a health professional time to listen to a sick patient and to observe. Such practices lend themselves to chronic illnesses and to patients diagnosed with multiple conditions.

Cooks create slow food for leisurely eating, usually for enjoying in community with others.

Slow fiction, in the sense of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or Ann Patchett’s Run, is best read slowly, time taken to consider the characters, their victories and defeats, and perhaps impart meaning to our own lives.

We need fast medicine when an emergency or an easily diagnosed condition arises: A broken leg requires definite and rapid action. Antibiotics heal certain infections in days. A heart attack calls for immediate measures to stabilize the patient.

A half-hour lunch means a quick meal, not necessarily an unhealthy meal. Apple slices with tuna and cottage cheese can be prepared in minutes.

Fast fiction is fiction whose world we enter immediately when we want escape from a period of tedium and boredom or to relax after a busy day.

I gravitate now toward slow fiction, both as a reader and as a writer. I’m less interested in fiction that sews up all the problems into a neat garment. I prefer fiction that “amounts to something.” This fiction gives hope through personal friendship, restored community, and joy dependent on character rather than outward attainments or answering all the questions.

Patriot Tax?

 

How about a Patriot Tax to pay off the war debt which the United States accumulated as a result of the Afghan and Iraq wars? Those who favor tax increases to lower our debt and those who favor spending cuts might cease their constant paralyzing disagreements by considering this tax.

Those who wish to raise revenue through taxes could recognize a Patriot Tax as a way to pay off debts without cutting Social Security or Medicare. Those who wish to cut spending could nevertheless see the Patriot Tax as justified, since this tax would pay only for the debt from two wars voted by Congress, in which our troops risked their lives.

Normally, when the country fights a major war, Congress and the President raise taxes to pay for it. We did not do this for the Afghan and Iraq wars. Thus, a Patriot tax seems fitting, even if a bit late.

Shutdown, Day 9, View Not From Washington

 

State Department officials attempting to carry out U.S. policy overseas, despite the shutdown, must answer embarrassing questions from the foreign press. John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, answered one such question, as reported by ABC news.

“I am absolutely confident that when we get this moment of political silliness behind us, we will be back on track,” Kerry said in Indonesia, where he was attending meetings at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. We have recently recognized the importance of Asian nations to our economy as well as to our security arrangements.

President Obama was scheduled to attend but canceled his trip to stay in Washington while Republicans and Democrats wrestle with funding the federal government and bringing roughly 800,000 furloughed employees back to work.

The news report indicates how the diversion of our energy to the shutdown, and possible debt default, affects our influence overseas. China, of course, scored brownie points off our humiliation. Chinese officials cautioned that a default might change their thinking about the creditworthiness of the US government.

Shutdown on Whidbey Island

 

Due to the U.S. government shutdown, hundreds of workers at the naval air station on Whidbey Island, Washington State, where I live, have been furloughed. The impact of hundreds of people worrying about their paychecks will certainly impact the local economy.

A country commissioner pointed out that the local government is just now recovering from the recession and sequestration. She wished that the national government would stop manufacturing crises that only hurt the ordinary citizen.

The executive director of one of the Island towns commented: “Let’s just hope for a quick resolution to this. When you take people’s pay away for no good reason, it hurts everybody.”

As of this writing, the shutdown has entered Day 5.

Why Rachel Left The Church and Why She Came Back

 

A millennial explains why she left the church. In a nutshell: “We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.”

Then Rachel explains the reasons why she came back. They include: baptism, confession, healing, communion, confirmation, union with Christ.

Serious practitioners of Christianity have become a minority group in the United States. Searching Christians are driven away by the lack of sacrifice in a gospel that emphasizes material success for following Jesus. They are equally repelled by the lack of love evidenced in legalistic congregations.

Those Christians who have returned to the church after a departure may lead the church into a community more kin to its vibrant beginnings. This Christianity celebrates covenant community based on Christ’s love and discipleship. A minority community of committed “subversives” within the broader culture works likes yeast within dough.

Shutdowns, Debt Ceilings, and the Safest Currency in the World

 

The government may shut down. We’ve done this before, and Congress has usually resolved the issue in a few days time, albeit, at varying levels of inconvenience to constituents.

Far more serious is the threatened debt ceiling crisis. When Congress approached the brink on the debt ceiling in 2011, Standard and Poor’s, the credit rating agency, lowered the credit rating for the United States for the first time in history. At the last minute, Congress raised the debt ceiling (albeit at the cost of the infamous  sequester agreement) and the United States dollar remained the safest currency in the world. If we actually refuse to pay our bills this time, our premier standing will be at risk.

To our discredit, we lack understanding of how our financial crises influence more than our domestic interests. We don’t take into account how they affect our foreign standing in the world. How much would our influence in the world decrease if, say, the Chinese renminbi became the world’s top currency? And how can we expect others nations to aspire to democracy if they see the world’s most famous democratic nation writhing in constant financial paralysis?

Father, Dad, Mother, Mom

 

Our names for our parents or parent figures, the first adults we meet on coming into this world, tell a great deal about us: culture, age, status, and of course relationship with the parents.

I called my father “Daddy.” I never remember using “Dad.” I think this reflects my Southern heritage. I called my mother “Mom” most of the time, though occasionally my brother and I in talking of her would use the more affectionate Southern term “Mama.”

The parental terms used by the characters in my stories mirror these characteristics. In A Sense of Mission, Ethan, raised by elite New England parents, calls his father “Dad,” never “Daddy.” His mother he calls “Mother.” His aunt, brought up in an even more traditional atmosphere, called her parents “Mother” and “Father.”

Ethan’s son Brendan, reflecting their more intimate status, calls Ethan “Daddy” until he reaches a certain age, then calls him “Dad.”

Byron, the abused son in Quiet Deception, calls his father “Pop,” reflecting both ridicule and his social status.

Our names for the ones with whom we begin our lives mirror the affection (or lack of) that we first learn from them.

Ninety-Nine Percent: Less Money for Everything From Mall Trips to College Education

 

The top one percent (1%) of Americans earned over nineteen percent (19.3) of household income in 2012, according to news reports. This share is the largest since 1928, shortly before the Great Depression. Inequality is not merely the result of the recession that began in 2008. Income inequality has been growing for three decades, according to the reports.

Last year, as the recession eased, the income of the top one percent rose twenty percent. The income of the remaining ninety-nine percent rose one percent.

The generosity of wealthy people is well known: Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and countless others. However, a vibrant economy needs a large middle class. They spend more of their income. They are more numerous and buy more goods and services.

We may, and should, discuss the morality of a country in which the rich grow richer and the income of ordinary workers does not pay for decent housing and education. A just society rewards those who work hard, even if they don’t make huge incomes. However, sheer desire for a productive, growing economy compels us to address the reasons behind the increasing income inequality.

Diplomacy The Old-Fashioned Way

 

Noting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peripatetic globe trotting, I remember a criticism someone leveled at U.S. diplomacy at the beginning of the digital age. Now that we have instant electronic communications, he said, we don’t need diplomats. Now the leaders can communicate electronically.

Thankfully, national leaders can and do utilize modern communications, but face to face meetings remain essential. These meetings do not magically appear. Venues, lists of invitees, translators, hotels, protocols (who will sit next to whom in an order established over centuries) must be organized, at times on short notice. Executive summaries, background papers, and talking points provide up-to-the-minute information for the principals, flying in for a day or two.

Diplomats who live in these countries and speak the language perform these functions. They hold conversations, not only with leaders, but with ordinary citizens of the country. They talk to the opposition who may one day lead and to the younger populace who will become the next movers and shakers. Person to person remains paramount. Electronic communication enhances. It can never replace.

Kerry is especially knowledgeable about the work of a diplomatic outpost. He is the son of a U.S. diplomat and spent at least a few years of his childhood living in U.S. overseas missions. Kerry likes to tell of the time when his father and family were posted to Berlin during the days of the Cold War. The twelve-year-old Kerry, using his diplomatic passport allowed him as part of a diplomatic family, biked through checkpoints one day over to East Berlin.

His father, Kerry says, was not pleased when he found out, confiscating his young son’s passport to prevent future such escapades. “You could have caused a diplomatic incident,” he lectured the future Secretary of State.

Syria Who?

 

Now with an agreement between the U.S. and Russia over the Syrian impasse on chemical weapons, we appear to have dodged the bullet, temporarily at least.

What a relief. Now we can return to what’s really important: Miley Cyrus, football, Justin Beiber, and the vendor who was fired for hating ketchup. As well as the personal tragedies (mostly American) served up to us on our news feeds as entertainment.

Iraqi Shadow Haunts Syria

 

I watched Colin Powell’s presentation before the UN Security Council in 2003 as he tried to persuade members to follow the U.S. lead into Iraq. Many members of the Security Council were unconvinced, as well they might be. The charge that Iraq harbored chemical or other weapons of mass destructions proved unfounded. We learned the truth only after the deaths of Americans, Iraqis, and those allies who, believing us, followed us into war.

Critics later charged that American officials molded U.S. intelligence to fit a desire to attack Iraq, though Iraq at the time posed no direct threat to us. The intelligence was flawed, deliberately “cherry picked” to suit our purposes. We are now paying for that choice.

As America lays out intelligence about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, where the evidence is much stronger, our past deception haunts us. No nation is unswervingly honest, but the United States before Iraq was trusted more than most. After the misuse of intelligence in the runup to Iraq, we lost our valuable credibility. Indeed, our right to lead in foreign policy anywhere in the world is now questioned.

Trust, once lost, is not easily regained.

 

Syria: Praying in the Peace

 

This afternoon Christians of all persuasions in our small island community came together to pray for the situation in Syria. The most peace I have felt in days washed over me in that quiet sanctuary.

I prayed for the people of Syria, for leaders in this country and abroad, for peace between Israel and Palestine, for the people of my faith in the Middle East, and for the people of all faiths in that conflicted land.

How often do we take time out of busy days to surround ourselves with listening silence, to pray without distractions?

I didn’t know such a quiet simplicity was so powerful. God grant peace to the nations such as I felt this afternoon.

Syria: Questions To Help Us Think

 

To attack Syria or not to attack Syria with missile strikes has divided everyone, it seems, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Rather than give my own opinion (which is still evolving), I’m enclosing links to two thoughtful pieces. One is a general question-and-answer piece about Syria. The other is a colunn by Nicholas Kristof, a journalist for The New York Times whom I have always admired:

Question and Answer

Kristof article

 

Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend?

 

Those faded photos on the walls of my office at the U.S. consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, hinted at beginning bonds between two disparate nations. American oil prospectors sit in sand-dusted offices, close to where the consulate is now, resting a few moments before continuing the search for the black gold that would transform both nations. In 1938, Dammam well No. 7, a few miles from where I later was to work, began producing.

At the time, most Americans lived in small towns or central cities. Suburbs were mostly for the elite, founded on train lines that connected them to the still important city. Then came World War II, with its need for energy to power war machines. Following victory by America and her allies, Americans fled to the car-centric suburbs. The U.S. formed alliances with Middle Eastern governments, none of which could be called democracies, in order to keep the oil flowing for our cars and machines.

Americans had oil in their veins from the beginning of oil exploration in the 1800’s. Thousands of them from Oklahoma, Texas, and other oil producing states found jobs at Saudi Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, in a city built for them, with housing, swimming pools, restaurants, a commissary, and medical care.

Thus, the United States became bound to the Middle East, with all its religious divides, power politics, and ethnic hatreds.

During the Soviet era, the alliances were clear. We were against communism and so were they, at least the countries that provided us with oil. The founding of Israel complicated the alliances, but until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, our friends were the enemies of our enemies.

Since then, our major conflicts have risen from those early alliances. The terrorism that haunts us grew out of them.

Syria, our current nightmare, while not a friend in any traditional sense, is the enemy of our enemy, a secular state that opposed our terrorist foes. Now it, too, is home to a human tragedy that threatens to engulf the whole region and the world beyond. Our NATO allies are intricately bound to the region, affected by refugees from its wars. China’s dependence on oil to power its growing economy makes it a front row participant.

So those rough prospectors pictured in my office at the U.S. consulate began something that we never learned to deal with in any long term way. We wanted the oil, whatever the consequences.

The consequences have arrived.

Syria: No Good Options

 

We are weary of our Viet Nams, our Iraqs, our Afghanistans, and our Libyas. We have fought, shed blood, and expended treasure for what we are not sure.

We are cured of our hubris that followed the end of World War II and later the cold war. We know that sending in our military when wrongs are done does not necessarily end the wrongs. As we contemplate the brutal evidence of innocent men, women, and children dying horrible deaths in Syria after a probable gas attack, we know a military response may not stop the brutality.

We should know, if we contemplate action, not to expect a democracy friendly to us or even a democracy at all as a result. It could even encourage another Iranian style theological state, quite hostile to us.

The bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad has not attacked us nor supported al-Qaeda nor Iranian nuclear ambitions. If we should decide to act in Syria, we should do so with the motive of, possibly, shortening this inhumane war. Pure altruism and nothing more. Most likely we shall gain, if anything, only that. No scenes of welcome as liberators. It may be enough—if we take the chance and lives are saved. But it is not a definite nor easy decision to make. We can at least refrain from name-calling the decision makers. Prayer for them, and sympathy, are more in order.

What Do the Youth of Afghanistan Want?

 

An article in The New York Times examines the youth of Afghanistan. They have adopted bits of American culture, some of the clothes and music. However, they also appear wedded to the mores and customs of their parents.

One young Afghan woman protested against Western values. She expressed fear that her society would be “corrupted like that of the West.”

These ideas are discouraging to many Americans. Women have been brutalized in that traditional society. We surely want an end to the inferior status of women.

We may learn other lessons, however. The first is that American culture is not always as desired in the rest of the world as we sometimes think, or, indeed, as it used to be in the past. We treasure equality and the freedom to pursue one’s own path. Others in places like Afghanistan see us as condoning drugs, promiscuity, permissiveness, and dysfunctional government.

Although we wish to see changes in Afghanistan, we can be sympathetic also to the views they have of America. We are, perhaps, not the beacon we once were.