Protocols of the Elders of Zion

It was the deadliest and one of the most persistent hoaxes in history. You probably have not heard of it & if you did you probably did not believe it, but millions did know about it, did believe it AND acted on their beliefs. Millions more were affected.

Alex and I went to a lecture on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Considering this document is instructive from so many angles. It is obviously a study in hate, but it is perhaps more pragmatically a study in how hoaxes, credulity and the desire to believe in conspiracy shapes events.

Sure, it is all wrong, but it is still all true
The Protocols were debunked almost immediately after they were promulgated in 1902/3. It just made no sense. Supposedly, the protocols recorded a meeting of Jewish leaders sometime around 1897, where they laid out a plan for world domination. From the beginning, the facts just did not make sense. For example, the event is said to take place AROUND 1897. There was no precise date. Where the meeting took place was also left unclear, as well as who attended or how they got there. Presumably, a large meeting of international leaders would be a logistical feat attracting some attention. Nobody ever came forward to claim to have been at the meeting or seen the meeting.

None of this seemed to matter. Some believers just assumed that Jews were so crafty that they could cover their trail so that nobody could find it. More surprisingly, many other believers admitted that the facts were all wrong, but that they somehow represented a greater truth. Sure, it is all wrong, but it is still all true.

Weaponizing lies for an international audience
The Protocols had a long lasting and malicious legacy. It was created to be weaponized as a tool of hate and it worked. Ralph Nurnberger said that this was the single most damaging antisemitic document in history, worse even than “Mein Kampf.” The Protocols built on a long tradition, but they made antisemitism international and gave it the rationale we recognize today. They had a big impact in the Islamic world, where Jews had lived in relative harmony since the Islamic conquests, and in places that did not have any, or many, Jews at all, such as in Japan. It persists in these places. Nurnberger mentioned a recent Cairo bookfair the featured multiple edition of the “Protocols.” When Israeli diplomats complained, they were told that they did not have to attend.

The more facts you bring to debunk, the more we think it is true
As I mentioned above, the “Protocols” were debunked right away and continued to be debunked as different editions showed up in different places. When the “Protocols” came to the USA, the “New York Times” wrote a full-page article pointing out the various problems with the “Protocols.” The “Times of London” has done this earlier. This, ironically, this debunking confirmed the belief for true believers, since the “Protocols” warned that Jews controlled the media and for the believers that fact of the debunking just proved the truth.

This is one reason why conspiracy theories are so persistent. They include within them the antibodies against truth. In fact, the more facts come out against them, the more it confirms the belief.

The “Protocols” are now in their second century. Unfortunately, they are not just history.
This event was sold out and every chair was taken. Good to know that enough people have the intellectual curiosity to be attracted to such events.

Tom Lloyd & Susan Bell

Had lunch with old friends from Brazil – Tom Lloyd and Susan Bell. I worked with Susan just a few years ago. Tom I have not seen for more than thirty years.

We worked together in Porto Alegre, first post for both of us. He was (still is) married to a Brazilian woman and he speaks Portuguese at 5/5 level. This is nearly impossible for someone who did not learn the language as a child.

Funny thing, we wanted to ask about each other’s spouses and families to catch up, but we talked around it for a little while. Both of us are still married to the same spouse as before, but a lot of people are not. It would be a little awkward to ask about a former spouse.

Foreign Service is not kind to marriages but both of us were lucky to have good wives who tolerated our odd lifestyles. I know lots of colleagues who have had many wives. One had six, much like Henry VIII but w/o so much drama. He kind of collected them in each of his postings. I suppose he thought it would help him learn the language and customs. There are easier ways to practice a language.

My pictures show Tom & me participating in the beer ceremony and then Tom and Susan.

What was your first foreign trip? is my Story Worth for this week.

Jake and Mark Srnec

I am not sure why I got it into my head that I should go, but I opened a separate bank account, worked extra shifts at the bookstore, skipped meals and saved my money to pay a trip to Germany. Looking back, I am sort of impressed that I pulled it off. My preparations were inadequate. I had a youth hostel membership, so inexpensive places to stay. It needed to be inexpensive, since I didn’t have credit cards and besides the price of my ticket, I managed to save only a little less than $400. I thought that I could speak some German because of classes in HS and college. I had an okay accent, but my communication skill was mostly limited to asking where things were and ordering beer.

With the confidence of ignorance

The cheapest flights left from Chicago. I splurged on a bus ticket (rather than hitchhike) and caught the plane. My flight landed in Frankfurt early in on a June morning. It was exciting to be in a foreign country for the first time. I had a brief scare. My backpack was absolutely the last thing to come onto the luggage carousel. Then I left the airport. I saw German flags and heard everybody speaking a language I could sort of understand. There was a light rain. My response was – “shit, what have I done?” followed by despair and confusion. I think that I might have chickened out and gone home on the next flight, but my charter ticket was valid only 30 days hence. Since I could not go back, my best option was forward, so I went forward.

I had a map where I had drawn a route, a circuit through southern Germany and Austria. I wanted to go to Salzburg because I read a National Geographic article talking about its charm. I wanted to go to Munich because of the famous beer halls. I filled in along the way with stops that I figured were a short day’s distance and had youth hostels I thought I could find. My first stop was the university town of Heidelberg. This was the setting for “The Student Prince.” I never saw the operetta, but my mother had the album by Mario Lanza. This was the basis of my decision making in those days. I intended to stay at the youth hostel there and I figured on taking the train from Frankfurt.

I easily found the train station, successfully bought a ticket and got on the wrong train. I fell asleep almost as soon as I got on. After all, I had come in on an overnight flight and was tired. When I work up, I was going north when I should have been going south. When the conductor came by for tickets, he was puzzled and asked me where I thought I was going. I told him Heidelberg and he told me that this train would not get me there. I had to get off and go back. As I recall, the proper sentence “Ich habe den falschen Zug genommen.“ That seemed to work.

I got to Heidelberg. It was a delightful town. I probably should have located the youth hostel right away, but I was beguiled by a beautiful beech and oak forest on the way to the castle, so I went up the hill first. It was late by the time I was done, and I could not find the youth hostel, so ended up in a park and slept on a park bench. Nothing like being a bum on your first night. Nobody bothered me but there was a late-night incident. A drunk was evidently trying to take a crap in the bushes and crapped his pants. I heard him swearing and saw him walking off w/o pants. When the sun came up, I looked. Sure enough, there was a pair of pants full of crap – an inauspicious introduction to glorious Germany.

Under financed and looking for free rides
Germany was more expensive than I thought. I figured out that I did not have the money for the luxury of taking the train wherever I needed to go, so I hitchhiked. It was not too hard to get rides and it was fun to try out my German. Drivers were tolerant of my bad German. Surprisingly, I don’t recall anybody speaking to me in English, with the single exception below, even though most Germans speak English and my efforts with German must have been painful on their ears. My experience with hitchhiking, both in America and Europe, was that people who pick you up want to do most of the talking. Since it is their car, it is their option. I didn’t need to speak the language very well if I didn’t have to talk much beyond asking where they guy was going.

Only two of my rides still stick in my mind. The one was a guy with a BMW. He had fun showing how fast he could drive his powerful car on the autobahn. I noticed the speedometer getting up to 240 kilometers per hour. I was not sure how much that was in MPH (turns out it was 144 MPH), but I knew it was a faster than I wanted to go. I must have showed that. This made the driver happy. “hast du Angst”, he asked. I would not admit it, but I was full of angst and glad when he let me out.

The other ride I recall was on the way to Saltzburg. I noticed that the driver had an odd accent, but I figured it was a kind of regional dialect. Bavarian was hard to understand, and I figured he was speaking some variation of that. After around 15 minutes, he addressed me in English. Turned out he was French and did not speak German very well. He asked if he could speak English. Okay with me. Funny that both of us were laboring to speak a language that neither of us mastered.

Beware vampires
My strangest experience was on the way to Zell om Zee. This one was all my own imagination. It was hard to get rides Alps and I was out in middle of nowhere. (This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps. “Big Lebowski” fans will understand.) Darkness was coming, so I just looked for a place to hide and sleep. I walked up a path and found a forest clearing and stretched out. Not long after it got dark, I started to think about vampires. This was not Transylvania but there were European mountains like in the scary movies. When you are alone in the dark, a stranger in a strange land, you think less clearly. I have been afraid of vampires since I watched Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula” when I was around seven years old. I fashioned a cross out of some sticks, just in case vampires came by. None did. When the sun came up, I felt stupid, but a man’s reasoning is different in 2 am gloom than it is in the bright sunlight at 2 pm.

Who knows? Maybe the vampire never showed because of my preparations. Besides the vampire scare, this was a hungry time. Stores were closed or not available, so I had nothing to eat for a day & a half. I got to Zell am Zee the next afternoon. The youth hostel featured an evening meal, but I had to wait until evening to get it. When it finally came, I ate as fast as I could. I could tell food was not very good, but it tasted better than anything ever. I was sitting next to a Danish guy, who also seemed food deprived, judging by the speed of his fork. Coming up for a breath, he commented “hunger is the best cook.”

“We Danes are an ugly lot; you could be a Dane”
The Dane and I became temporary fast friends. Danes are generally nice people and the usually speak English very well. We were talking about the relative beauty of women from around Europe, and that extended to a more general discussion of national characteristics. My Danish friend thought that the most attractive people in Europe were people from Italy and Spain. Speaking about his own people, he lamented. “We Danes are an ugly lot.” Looking at me continued, “You could be a Dane.” I objected to “ugly” and “you could be” being so close together. He claimed to be referring only to my blue eyes and blondish hair. I still had hair in those days. I let it go. Danes, IMO, are attractive as a group. It is not a club I would reject.

Speaking of temporary friends, one of the fun things about solitary low-budget travel is the fellow travelers you meet and get to know. Everybody is lonely, so you make friends faster. I found it especially easy to get along with Australians. Australians were more like typical Americans than any other nationality in my experience. They were wonderfully practical, spoke a type of English and they liked to drink beer. (I prioritized beer over food, BTW. It was a good choice. Beer, after all, is liquid bread.) I quickly learned, however, that it was a bad idea to stay with Australians until the end of the night’s drinking. They tended to get into fights. Interesting how they could manage to insult people in languages they could not speak.

The funniest “friends” were a couple of Irishmen I met in Frankfurt. They were looking for their stuff. Seems they arrived in Frankfurt a few days before, checked into a pension and went out to get drunk. They were unable to find their lodging the next day. I walked around with them, as they hoped to recognize something. They had not found their stuff by the time we parted company.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose
If freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, I achieved freedom. I ran out of money the day before I was scheduled to leave, so I went to the Frankfurt airport a whole day early, since I had no place else to go and just hung around. I was very happy finally to get on the plane. Flying was a little classier in those days. You could get snacks more easily, and I ate enough to make up for the lean day before. Hunger is the best cook. The very big drawback to flying in those days is that they had smoking sections. I got stuck in the smoking section. The stewardess asked me if I would move so that a family could sit together. I foolishly agreed. I really hate cigarette smoke and I sat next to a guy who told me he was afraid to fly. He smoked to assuage his fear. This was a Lufthansa flight and they had free beer. I drank down several and was able to sleep despite the foul air. I woke up only for the food.

When I got home, I felt changed in many ways. Physically, I was lighter by around 15 lbs. My father said that I looked like a scarecrow, but I felt okay. I didn’t really see very much of the German attractions, since I was such a low budget traveler, but I was glad to have gone. I felt like a sophisticated world traveler. I appreciated Germany, but I also appreciated America more. Amerika, du hast es besser.

Coda
There is a two-part coda to this story. Chrissy & I went to Germany in 1989. We took the ferry from Oslo to Keil and then drove around. We had Mariza and Alex along this time. I was looking forward to going to all those nicer German places that I could not afford in my poor student days. Now we had more money, but we also had little kids. Little kids do not do well in nice European restaurants. We ended up eating at McDonald’s more often than I would have liked.

The second part of my story relates to language. When I got to Germany, I was surprised that I could still speak and understand German. In fact, it seemed even easier than before. So, I happily spoke to people and usually got what I wanted. We were down in southern Germany when I got a clue. I was talking to a woman at breakfast in a language that I thought was German. Finally, she asked me – “That language you are speaking. It is very much like German and I understand most, but what is it?”

I had learned Norwegian before taking my post there. Norwegian has lot of words like German. What I think happened was that I was simply mixing the languages, sometimes doing Norwegian with a German accent and sometimes the other way around. It was very fluent, which is why the woman thought it was a language, but it was something of my own inadvertent creation. I guess that is how creole languages develop.

Post script
Notes from my more recent Frankfurt visit
My visit to Germany was in 1979 – my pre-camera days. I spent a day in Frankfurt on my way back from Iraq and have some pictures from then. The place did not change, but I had enough money for good food and drink.

Civil society – the third pillar

These are the best of times
Unemployment is near historical lows, while median income is pushing historical highs. Our air and water are cleaner than any time in living memory. Cancer rates have been dropping for three decades. Crime is down in the same period. Gun violence is down. Even the poor have access to wonderful technologies that the world’s richest people could not have a generation past.

Is everybody happy yet?
Well … no. Despite all this wonderful news, people are dissatisfied and angry. We can dismiss some of this to simple ignorance. Not everybody knows about the low unemployment rates, and most people you ask probably think problems like cancer are on the rise. But it goes well beyond that, because despite the gains in material well-being, many Americans have lost something very valuable. They have lost their places in communities.

The third sector
I went to see Raghuram Rajan talk about his new book, “The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind” (Penguin Press, 2019). I finished the audio-book version during my drives down to the tree farms, so I was primed and interested. In fact, I was primed way before. When I studied for my MBA at University of Minnesota, they had a whole department called “business, government and society” to talk about the interactions. Supporting civil society – the third sector – was a big program goal in my work in post-communist Poland. In Krakow, we sponsored a series of talks called “Habits of the Heart,” explaining that democracy was a lot more than just voting. Civil society, community and habits were like the lubricants in an engine. W/o this, the whole machine would sputter to a halt. One reason I am troubled by apparent decline of community in America is that I believe what we told our Polish friends.

Not new but worth repeating with new variations
What Dr. Rajan said was not new, but I think it needs to be restated. He talked about the three big components of society – the state, the market & community. Of course, you could argue for more divisions, but you must keep it manageable. Each of these sectors complements and balances the others. Government makes rules and exercises power. It needs to be balanced by the power of the market, which is balanced by government and both are balanced and complemented by community.

The book went into a lot of history about how each developed. Suffice it to say that community has been ceding power & responsibility to government and the market. This was not always or even usually bad. Community can be great, nurturing and enabling, but it can also be stifling in excluding. The balance from the government and markets was a good thing. Government could reach in and protect oppressed. Markets could give opportunities to go beyond what your parents had or did.

In recent decades, however, community has been atrophying more than is healthy, as both government and the market usurp its functions. Big government and big business are sometimes rivals, but often collaborators. When one gets big, the other does too. What gets squeezed is community. The small and the local are run over by the big and the national. This is Walmart pushing out small hardware stores, or Federal programs displacing local charities. Large banks absorb community bankers.

Why is small & local better?
The answer is that they not always are better. Most goods and services can be better provided by larger or more centrally organized enterprises. Walmart pushes out local stores because it can provide better products at lower prices. Sometimes it is less “fair” than offering lower prices or better services. Regulations like Dodd-Frank helped big banks knock out community banks, since the big guys could more efficiently cope with regulations and reporting requirements. A community banker might base a loan decision on subjective local knowledge and relationship. A report that justifies an action with, “Because I knew the situation” does not do well with Federal regulators.

Small and local has advantages in that it is often more attuned to local nuances. But the biggest advantages might be less evident and paradoxical. The small & local is often less efficient and it might be better for society in the long run precisely because of this fault. It gives more people a “valuable place” and makes our societal interface more human. I know this is intangible and maybe even illogical, but it is human.

I prefer to drink beer that is locally produced – or at least has a local story – even though I cannot tell the taste difference and the local brew often costs more than something more mass produced. I also prefer to drink at a restaurant or brew-pub, even though for a fraction of the cost I can buy a similar quality brew to drink at home. I am celebrating inefficiency, or maybe trading efficiency for community, perceived or real.

Maybe we have become efficient enough
We have largely escaped the poverty trap that ensnared ever generation of humanity until only a few generations ago. We have so much more stuff than they had, but we have lost some of the community that enriched their lives. We are richer in things and poorer in spirit. Can’t we choose to have both more stuff and robust community?

We can all listen to Taylor Swift
We all want to best we can get. It used to be that the best was just okay, to be less charitable we used to be content with mediocrity.

Rajan cites the examples of Elizabeth Billington and Taylor Swift. Elizabeth Billington was the most celebrated singer of her age, the early 19th Century. She made the big bucks, or the prime pounds, since she earned her money in Britain. In 1801, she earned the princely sum of £15,000. This was about $1 million in today’s dollars. Big money. Taylor Swift earns more. She grossed $250 million on a single tour a couple years ago. Does Taylor Swift sing more than 250 times better than Billington?

The difference is technology. Billington could reach only a few hundred people for each performance and she had to show personally in order to be heard. This meant that her fan base was limited by her reach. Only a very small number of people actually heard Billington sing. Most Americans, even those who are not fans, have heard Taylor Swift. She can make money from people how have never shared a concert hall with her and supported by video and amplification she can reach a lot more people per venue.

Superstars displace the ordinary. There used to be a much bigger market for people of medium talent and attractiveness. People are less likely today to pay extra for someone singing one of Taylor Swift’s songs, when for less cash they can listen to a recording of Swift herself.

Superstar hogging = inequality
Superstars hog the work of thousands, maybe millions, and they are compensated vastly for this. They effectively duplicate themselves millions of times, putting no additional time or effort into each rendition after the first. This is the root of inequality.
It gets worse. Superstars also hog the gigs outside their own field of expertise. I heard Oprah narrating a nature show, got information about credit cards from Alec Baldwin and Jenifer Aniston told me what water to drink.

he superstars hollow out the middle. People who are very talented and well-known but not the very top find themselves out of work. It doesn’t do much good to be in the top-hundred or even the top ten. It is much like the Olympics. We know the winner of the gold, might pay some attention to silver, treat the bronze as a bit player and have no idea about anybody below that.

The center cannot hold (a job)
This superstar hogging is not limited to celebrities. They are just easier to see. The same goes for CEOs, investors and even skilled workers. Anything where tech expands reach.
Rajan mentioned accounting. We no longer hire ordinary guys to do our taxes, since Turbo Tax or other programs “know” all the routine things. Superstar accountants do better than ever, and the guys who move paper are still there. The places in the middle are gone.
Inequality affects community, but in a round about way. Inequality does not cause the breakdown of mixed communities, but rather what causes inequality also breaks down mixed community.

Rajan places a lot of the motivation to create communities of like-minded people on the quality of schools. Parents want the best schools possible for their kids because they know that little differences in kind will produce big differences in outcomes, as above. What is important in school is NOT how much money is spent or the quality of teaching, although both these things go with good schools. The key factor are the students themselves and their parents. Kids are trained, socialized and motivated by their peers. Not only are you judged by the company you keep, you are also shaped by your friends. Parents are pushing this for their kids.

I was waiting to hear about possible solution to the dilemma of community. There was no “silver bullet” in this case. Community is about relationships and relationships take effort to build and sustain. So, the solutions are that it takes work and constant attention. We need to encourage civil society and community when the opportunity arises. This is not satisfying.

In the book, where Rajan has more space to expound than he did in a short talk, he talks about inclusive localism and dispersing authority to lower levels. I do not recall him using the term subsidiarity (might have missed it) but that is clearly what he is talking about. I kept on thinking that he was reinventing the ideal of Tocqueville’s America. We have a lot to work with. Our land grant universities did a great job of elevating American. Our community colleges today can help in that role. It might be good to have some sort of national service. That is a great equalizer. America adapted before and we will again. That is vague, but I do think it is true.

The third pillar: ‘Inclusive localism’ as the key to rebuilding American communities – AEI2

What do you want to do when you retire? is this week’s Story Worth question.

This question comes a little late, but it is something I thought about for a long time and that I am now implementing. I am doing what I wanted to do when I retired.

Knowing when to leave your life’s work
I was eligible to retire in 2005. It was nice to know that I could go, but I wanted to stay. I felt unfinished. Career was going okay, but not remarkable. FS has an up or out promotion system. I had until 2009 to get promoted. I had opted to ‘open my window”, early which makes you eligible for senior promotion but risks the boot.I was afraid that I would not make it and they would kick me out, but I didn’t want to take the jobs most “career enhancing.”

Multiple identities
I was just confused, but I did have one good plan, a back to the roots plan. I was going to diversify into forestry. If they kicked me out of the FS, I would have another identity as a forest guy. Forests were my first passion, predating FS, predating almost everything after I learned to ride a bike. I dreamed of owing forest land. I deferred that dream. I thought maybe forever, but then I had a chance.

Sweet serendipity
Most of my success comes from sweet serendipity. This was no exception. When I was ready to buy forestland, tax law changed to make big paper companies ready to sell. Tracts of land were available all over the South. Chrissy was wonderful. She let me mortgage the house and we got our first forest land. I told her that I could not promise it would be a great investment, but I would not buy unless I could figure out at least how to break even.
Who knew how to buy forest land? I guessed that Internet did and started to research. I learned that the difference between having some trees and having timber was distance from mills and that the best place to own timber was in Virginia’s Southside. Much of the land was worn out by generations of tobacco, corn and cotton, but pine trees grew very well. I zeroed in on Brunswick County and went looking.

How silly I must have seemed – a city-boy Yankee who works for the government, driving a Honda Civic Hybrid in the land of Ford F150. But people of the South are very friendly and I am very lucky. One advantage was that I knew a little about trees and soils. I could identify trees and when the real estate agents showed me crap dirt, I could tell that too. They came to give me a modicum of respect.

In retrospect, I see that I paid more for the land than a savvy local would have done, but a lot less than a city slicker like me deserved. I ended up buying the land that the real estate agent really didn’t think I would buy. I am pretty sure that he showed me a cut over rutted place to contrast it with nicer looking places. But I noticed the little loblolly pines were firmly established in good dirt. The internal roads were okay and we had some blacktop frontage. It looked like crap, but I could imagine how it would be in a few years and that was beautiful. I have never regretted it.

Now I had two definers in my life. I was a diplomat and a forest owning conservationist. Proud of both.

Don’t hang around like a fart in a phone booth
To my surprise – and likely that of others – they promoted me to senior foreign service and then promoted me again to the next level. That meant I could stay until I was 65. Always leave when they still want you to stay, rather than hang around like a fart in phone booth. I put in my retirement request the same day I got my formal notification of promotion. The HR folks were surprised.

By that time, more than ten years after I was first eligible to retire, I felt I had done what I could in the FS. My last decade was my best one. It would have been a shame to leave with those songs unsung.

I got to do a year in Iraq. An an active war zone is not fun while you are doing it, but it is great to have done it. I was glad that I stepped up when it was my turn. Another factor was my second posting in Brazil. Brazil was my first post. I never felt I did a very good job because of my inexperience and poorly developed skills. Going back a second time let me pay back.

It was also great to relearn Portuguese. I got better than ever and fell in love with that beautiful language. Brazilian Portuguese is subtle and graceful – excuse the cliche – like a samba. Anyway, I felt I did better the second time, closed the loop.

The career capstone was really cool job as Senior International Advisor at Smithsonian. Does it get better? Time to go.

So it goes
Retirement has been better than I planned, even better than I hoped. I have been able to keep being a sometime diplomat. I got a temporary assignment in São Paulo and got to use my Portuguese. I got an assignment on the Columbia River Treaty and got to work with water, trees and tribal lands. There are good chances for other such work. I get the satisfaction of diplomacy w/o the anxiety of needing to work toward career goals.
My forestry work has been fantastically rewarding. I just feel good in the forest. It is existential. Being in the woods is not a means to an goal. It is the goal. I never get tired of it. Planning for the forest future is an added benefit. Now add on working with others passionate about forestry as president of the Virginia Tree Farm Foundation, member of the board on the Forest History Society, & active participant in our Virginia branch of longleaf restorers. I get to study (and sometimes start) prescribed fires, as well as attend professional conferences and meetings. Lots of the skills I use in the outreach are like those I learned in diplomacy, but now I do it in my own service.

Living in Washington is a big advantage for a gentleman of leisure. There are lots of lectures and events to attend. I attend lectures or events 2-3 times in an average week. Topics and speakers are interesting, and you usually even get free coffee, sometimes a free lunch. Yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Chrissy and I have also set up a “donor advised fund” to plan & regularize our charitable giving. A big part of the good life is giving. It so enriches the life of the giver that it might even be considered a little selfish.

Busier than ever?
Retired people sometimes say that they are busier than ever. This is rarely true. But you do need to plan your time better. When you work, you spend 8-10 hours every day working or commuting to work. It sucks your time, but you know where you are going to be most days. Retired people need to plan where they will be. I need a planning calendar more than I did when I knew I would be at work every day.

All good things must come to an end. I know that these halcyon days too will pass. I will not live forever and will likely not be in such good health for all the rest of my life. Sic transit gloria mundi. I hope that when my time comes, I go gracefully, much like my retirement, go while they still want you to stay. I hope that is some distance in the future. Living for now, I am a happy retired man, mostly doing what I think I should, seeking eudaimonia.

My first picture is from 2005. I am standing in front of some tree of heaven, an invasive that I have been fighting ever since we saw them. Notice the hard to see little trees just to the right. They are the bigger trees in the background in picture #2 and #4. The second picture is where the tree of heaven used to be. We made that into a meadow, a pollinator habitat. Picture #3 is the Brodnax place. #4 is Diamond Grove road, We own both sides. On the left side are those little trees from 2005, bigger now. Last is pollinator habitat again.

How did you rebel?

This week’s Storyworth is “How did you rebel as a child?”

The short answer is that I did not. My parents were very liberal (in the real, not political sense). Their rules made sense most of the time and did not have much reason to rebel. As mentioned in an earlier post, I was on swim team in HS, so I was always working out or tired during prime rebellion years.

I did, however, get crazy when I went away to college at University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. It was a very stressful time for me. I see that much clearer in retrospect that I did back then. Things started inauspiciously and went downhill. I was sick my first couple weeks at UWSP. Not sure what I had, but I was tired and achy all the time. I went out for swim team, but I was not good enough for college level, so one of the big things in my life was gone like the snows of last winter. I was going away from home for the first time. Neither my father nor anybody else I knew well had experience with going to college. My mother had died the year before, so I lost her stabilizing love. AND in Wisconsin at that time you could drink beer at age 18, and that was one thing I was good at doing.

I was lost and I fell in with others who were feeling some of the same things. We drank a lot and improvised all sort of games to enable us to drink more. I did not study, and I started skipping classes. My logic was simple. When I thought about what I learned in class, I could not think of very much, so I thought I could just wing it. I was mistaken. I got a 1.6 GPA my second semester, but still managed to make just above 2.0 for first year because of a few easy classes in the first semester. Bad as my grades were, I think they were the best of my group of drinking friends. None of them made it to graduation.

The nadir of my existence was my second Freshman semester to the middle of my first sophomore one. My only significant achievement was what I think was the streaking record. My friends & I ran naked through the Wisconsin campus in March. Streaking was a big deal for a little while in the early 1970s. It was a kind of social thing. Large crowds would gather to “welcome” streakers, and a couple dozen of us were out running that night. You can see the attached report from the local newspaper. I am the guy on the right of the screen, bandana but no hat. Never sure how to describe left and right on a screen, but I know for sure it is me because I got full-length photos from the newspaper photographer. I still have one, but I will publish only the newspaper version.

Early March is cold in Wisconsin. The ground is hard and frozen, with patches of ice and snow. I had a pair of hiking boots. I did not own a pair of running shoes in those days and I did not want to run in my boots, so I ran with socks but no shoes. It is hard for me today to put myself into that stupid kid mind-set, but I have pictures. We were caught and when I went to see the dean, he was less angry than impressed that we could tolerate the cold for so long. I recall he made a comment about freezing body parts; he was not referring to our toes.

We got in surprisingly little trouble for streaking. Some things were better back then. I got some kind of probation. Campuses were wilder in those days. This was 1974, although technically part of the 1970s, this was still the last gasps of the 60s in campuses. 1973-4 was in fact a cusp year. That was the year of the Arab oil embargo, the beginning of the energy crisis and the end of the post-war boom America had enjoyed for nearly the last three decades.

There had been no really hard times since before I was born. None of us baby-boomers could remember a time when America was not booming and getting richer. Now the American economy went to hell and did not properly recover until 1983. This changed the campus mood from one of carefree optimism (we all just assumed we would get good jobs no matter our academic record) to a careful pessimism (none of us would ever be as well off as our parents). Kids began to study harder and the era of competition had begun.
I considered dropping out of college between my freshman and sophomore years. I remember a particular day at my summer job at the cement factory. I was by myself loading bags on a small truck. The truck driver was not required to help, and this guy did not, but he did talk at me while I carried the bags. He asked me how I liked the job. I told him that I really hated it, but I needed the money for school. He asked me if it was worth it. Thinking back at my previous failures and prospect of not much better, I told him that I just didn’t want to be loading bags every day for the next 30 years. I recall that h made some nasty comment, although I don’t recall what. I decided to go back in the fall, more from inertia than design. I had almost wasted a year, but I did manage to “earn” 32 college credits, albeit with bad grades that haunted me when I applied to graduate school.

I do not regret it, however. I learned how to fail and to come back from failure. If you need that lesson, UWSP was a benign place to get it. My experience is one big reason I believe so strongly in second chances and redemption. A reasonable person would not have given a nickel for my prospects in the summer of 1974, but I turned out okay.

My “rebellious times” ended abruptly in my in the middle of my sophomore year. There were a few reasons. I got a girlfriend who was less impressed than were my drinking buddies by my remarkable capacity to drink a load of beer, throw up, and then come back for more. Girlfriends are big civilizing influences on crazy young men. I also was losing my drinking friends, as they started either to drop out or start studying, mostly the former. But maybe the big reason was just aging out of the wild times. A young man of twenty is just very different from a young man of eighteen. Our brains start to complete.

My grades turned dramatically. I was also very lucky in one particular class and professor that I see as an inflection point. I had never learned to write a research paper and the prospect terrified me. I was supposed to write a paper for a course on the history of the tribes of the American west that I liked a lot. I participated a lot in class and the professor seemed approachable, so I approached and told him of my fears of the research paper. I do not recall exactly what he told me, but it was something like, “you are not as dumb as you think you are.” He suggested that I do something on the Blackfeet of Montana and how the arrival of horses around 1730 changed their culture. He had done field work with the tribes and was excited by their history. He lent me a book called “the Horse in Blackfoot Culture” to get me started. I agreed that this was a truly exciting topic and I set out to find out how to write a research paper. Maybe the professor was generous. Maybe it is because my sister Christine Matel Milewski typed the paper for me and fixed my egregious spelling. But he gave me an A on the paper. I started to expect that I should just do that more often. I did and never again felt the need to rebel.

More correctly, I learned to rebel all the time w/o creating trouble, but that is a different story.

My first picture is my streaking. I am on the right of the screen. Running with me is my friend Gary and you can see Dan cheering us on. Good times.

How to get promoted

How to get promoted is a big question during this time when our FS reports are due. I think I can give some insights.

Let me “establish my cred”. I was on promotion panels twice, both times the career make or break transition panels to senior FS. I have also been on reconstituted panels twice. Beyond that, I retired at MC. Unpack that, since both factors are important. Getting to MC meant that I did okay in my own career and being retired means that I can speak more freely than if I worried about impressing or annoying the powers that be.

No old boys’ network
First let me say that the old boys or old girls network is not a factor on promotion panels, at least it was not in my experience. I did not know most of the people whose files I read, and nobody tried to exert any influence at all on me. Whether or not you get promoted, you cannot blame or credit a “fix,” at least it did not happen in my experience.
Related to that is that usually all that I knew about the candidates was what I read on the reports. If I knew the person well, I recused myself from the vote, as did others. I was pleased to note that in those cases, my panel colleagues came to the similar conclusions I would have.

The benefits of ignorance
We did not know in advance how many people would be promoted. Our job was to determine who should be promoted and put them in a rank list. This is good. It takes away the temptation to push someone over the line, if you do not know where the line will fall.

Paradox of skill
I was proud to be among good colleagues on the panel and of the FS colleagues whose reports I was reading. We really have a great group. There are more people who should be promoted than there are places for them. I think this leads to the “paradox of skill.” When everyone is really good, skilled at the highest level, random events play a bigger role. In our job, that tends to be something happening at post. Of course, the job you have matters a lot, but if there are no particular opportunities to shine, you cannot shine. These are unpredictable as international affairs. Consider officers who were in East Germany or Eastern Europe when the wall came down in 1989. They were likely assigned and went through language training a few years before. They looked forward to interesting jobs, but nothing like the chances they had. On the other hand, you might be assigned to a happening place that becomes suddenly sleepy after the crisis. There is nothing colder than ashes, after the fire is gone.

We all know careerist who try to get in on the action. They rarely do well, since they either arrive late to the party or show up after everybody has gone home.

So you have to be very good at your job and you have to be lucky. No surprise. The good news is that you have chances similar to everybody else.

You are not unique
One more macro consideration before I get into a few specifics. Almost ALL FSO think of themselves are unique or “a little bit of a rebel,” and most of us fear that “people like me” are not the kind to get promoted. I used to say that and I believed it, but the FS kept on messing with my worldview by giving me good assignments and promoting me. I had no connections coming in and there was/is nothing special about me. The system does not always choose the best and the brightest, but it is fair.

A few specifics
The things “they” tell you about EERs are mostly true. You have to be careful in how your write, emphasizing outcomes and explaining how you helped make it happen. You cannot be very modest, but don’t push it too hard. The best that any FSO can hope to be is necessary but not sufficient. You did not make anything happen, but you may have facilitated it. It is hard to balance you, them and the environment when talking about accomplishments.

Nobody much cares about the hard time you had or how hard you tried. Challenges met and overcome make a difference. Never complain about why you couldn’t do something. You would be surprised how many people waste valuable space telling panels about their troubles and what they would have done but did not. Those sorts do not get promoted.

Low ranking not the end
One serious criticism I have of the panels is the need to “low rank”. In each group, the panel needs to identify a certain percentage of low ranks. This might make sense except for the means. You have to find something specific in more than one EER. This is harder to find in EERs that you know are bad. Bad performers often know they are bad, so they fight hard to take out specific criticism and they never criticize themselves. You can tell that they are bad performers from the narrative, but you cannot find specific hooks. Otherwise good performers might let a criticism go or even include it in their own honest comments. Those are the ones we can find.

My point of view might be influenced by my own experience. Let me share it as a lesson. I was low ranked because they found that I was sometimes disrespectful of superiors. I made no secret of this, even wrote about it myself. I considered it a good thing in the right circumstances. I suspect that the panels did too, but they could find a specific criticism and they hung me on it.

Was my career in trouble? The NEXT year, the next panel promoted me to Senior Foreign Service. So, I was at the bottom one year and near the top on the next, with almost the same set of EERs and likely with some of the same competition. Be careful, maybe more careful than I was, but don’t worry too much.

BTW – if you are low ranked, don’t complain to colleagues. Nobody knows about it and it does not stay in your permanent record, but if you tell other people about it, they might think you are a loser. It becomes self-fulfilling. You can talk about it, as I did, when you are safely clear, but don’t insult the alligators until you have crossed the river.

Not always bad to be obtuse
Finally, just don’t take things too seriously. In the EER that got me promoted to MC, I wrote that the panel should promote me because “I increase the intelligence of any group I join. I like to think it is because I am so smart, but I suspect that it is because I am so obtuse that colleagues need to explain it several times and it makes them think it through again.” I got promoted. I don’t doubt that the panel members laughed a little, but it did stand out.