The Air War College is located on Maxwell Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama. It is a pleasant place and it is still summer in Alabama. The housing is nice. I am here for three days of seminars. It has been interesting so far. I like to get away sometimes and think about the work. I only wish I could translate the ideas better into practice.
Above is a B-25. It is also called the Mitchell bomber, named after Billy Mitchell, who warned America that the Japanese could launch a Pearl Harbor style attack. For his insight, he was court martialed, although later he was honored. Too bad he was already dead. He was a Wisconsin boy and the airport in Milwaukee is named for him too.
The Mitchell bombers planes were used in WWII and were the planes used during the Doolittle raids, when we showed the Japanese that we were serious about taking the war to them after Pearl Harbor.
Below is some of the housing on the base.
Below is the Wagon Wheel restaurant, where we had breakfast. It is simple eggs and bacon … and grits for those that like them.
I don’t know if it is true, but several people told me that air bases are required to have golf courses, the idea being that all that flat, grassy space is available in emergencies for landing or at least the storage of aircraft. It sounds a little glib, but who knows? Home owners in some arid regions sometimes get a discount on their fire-insurance policies if they have swimming pools that can serve as reservoirs. We got a discount on our insurance from USAA in New Hampshire because our house was within a convenient hose length from a pond. I thought that was just a specious reason until the condominium clubhouse caught on fire and the fire department did indeed tap the pond water. Their attempt to save the structure was futile but they did prevent the fire from spreading to the neighboring woods and homes.
On the left is pond in New Hampshire.
A surprising number of people hate golf courses. They are evidently offended by them and work themselves into a frenzy saying things like the land and resources devoted to golf courses could be used to feed poor people. I suppose if we were close to subsistence, this would be true and if we plowed up all the golf courses we could feed a few more people. Of course, there are lots of other places food is wasted that would come first. We have all sorts of fruit trees we don’t harvest and all kinds of unused land. I think the real problem is that luddites associate golf course with affluence. I don’t golf, never have. But golf courses are usually attractive. They provide nice vistas and often good places to run -around the peripheries; golfers get annoyed if you get to close to them.
Maxwell Air-Base features another luxury item – horses. Even the luddites rarely object to horses because they are graceful and beautiful. I would not want to own one, since I don’t know how to care for them, but I am glad to have them around. Mariza is very fond of horses. If she (and we) lived nearer to the tree farms, we could buy one for her.
Grazing animals are good management; of course a couple horses are not enough. It is good to have different types of animals, such as sheep or cows or goats to rotate in the pastures. Animal species have different digestive systems. The sheep help slow the spread of horse parasites and vice versa and tend to favor different mixes of greens. Healthy pastures are diverse because of the different habits of species and the different characteristics of their manure.
They have lots of nice trees on base and Alabama is a big timber state. Slash, Loblolly & longleaf pine together are called “southern pine” and they sustainably supply around 58% of American timber needs.
I kept to the smaller roads out of Pottsville. This part of Pennsylvania is very rural. I passed several tree farms; as you can see from the pictures they grow Christmas trees. I also passed a couple of places that advertised themselves as trappers, fur and hide buyers. You would think that they would be more circumspect in this PETA soaked world. It is nice to know that some people are still free enough to resist the pressures of the politically correct. I suppose they are well armed and irascible.
The PETA types that bravely throw red paint on little old ladies in fur coats tend to give a free pass to motorcycle gang members wearing leather coats and even PETA radicals understand that a well-armed guy living by himself who makes a living skinning animals in a dilapidated trailer is probably something you just shouldn’t fool with.
Another “scenic byway” is old Hwy 15 past Gettysburg. The area along the road looks a lot like it must have back in 1863, of course with the addition of the statues and monuments. Many Civil War battlefields are threatened. Most of the actual territory included in the battles is on private property. When the countryside was rural, there was no problem keeping it looking appropriately … rural. But today as shopping centers and subdivisions ooze out across the landscape the authenticity is threatened. Eventually we could be left with a little patch of green & a few cannons surrounded by fast food restaurants and parking lots. Following in the footsteps of Picketts charge across a Wal-Mart parking lot would probably not feel right.
Speaking of new buildings and parking lots, they built a new visitors’ center in Gettysburg. It was needed. The old building was too small for the growing crowds, but the new facility is a little too slick for my tastes, too organized. Part of the joy of visiting historic places is discovering new things, or more correctly discovering old things for yourself. The organization will give more information, but GIVE is the operative word. It is passive. If you get it laid out for you by someone else it is not so much discovery. There is a ridiculous amount of control as you can see from the picture of the sign. The wall in question is around three feet high. It would be hard to fall off in the first place and if you did it would be hard to be hurt. But I suppose the lawyers got at it.
Below is an even more interesting sign, although this one makes a good point. The picture says it all about which is the dominant animal in the relationship. The dog strides proudly off, leaving the man shuffling, hunched and simian-like to clean up behind.
I took one more side road, as I got off the main road and went through Emmitsburg. Below is a monument to the fallen of World War I in Emmitsburg, MD.
The keynote speaker at the SU symposium was Keith Reinhard, founder and president of Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA). This is an advertising professional with an impressive resume. You can read about him at this link but you already know his work. He wrote McDonald’s “You Deserve a Break Today” and “Two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun,” as well as State Farm’s long running theme, “Just Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There.”
Mr. Reinhard said that American business is uniquely placed to lead in burnishing the U.S. image abroad, pointing out that Coca-Cola alone has more than ten times as many employees as State Department. He also made some good points about travel to the U.S. It is hard to get visas; we don’t welcome tourist well when they get here and the U.S. does little in the way of travel promotion. All these things are true. People have been complaining about visas and trying to improve the travel situation for many years.
(IMO, the single best thing the USG could do to improve our image is improve how potential visitors are treated, from the minute they inquire about a trip to the U.S. until they put their foot back on their home soil. Most of the components of this are within the power of the USG, but this is a complex issue fraught with conflicting interests and priorities. I won’t even try to address them in this space. Smarter people than I have tried.)
U.S. businesses are indeed very important in shaping the way the U.S. is seen abroad. We have worked with businesses overseas and there are many venues for cooperation. Business can help sponsor July 4 celebrations; they can be part of seminars and symposiums; business leaders often make great speakers at events. But cooperation can be oversold. The notion that business will become involved in partnership with government to improve the U.S. image is one of those great ideas that seems always almost happening, but never quite arrives.
Business-government PR enterprises don’t go as smoothly in practice as they do in concept for some good reasons. Most people employed by Coke, for example, are doing things like bottling or distributing the product. This is similar for all businesses. Businesses do business. We cannot expect them to devote much of their time or money to helping the U.S. government do image building. They already pay taxes. They create jobs and build prosperity. That is their role.
Getting too close to the U.S. government can be a problem for businesses. Government’s embrace can be suffocating and dangerous for business and business connections can difficult for government.
Let’s say it plainly. If business and government form partnerships, they both hope to gain something from the joint enterprise. Unless everybody thinks the relationship through, much of what they expect might give the impression of impropriety and sometimes might actually be unethical.
It can be too easy for particular local firms to become the “go to” places for U.S. officials. Pretty soon it looks like the U.S. is endorsing or backing their products. Even though nobody says so, foreigners might treat them differently because of this. When working in Poland, I found that many people assumed that they could get better treatment for things like visas if they worked with firms somehow associated with the Consulate. We would sometimes have to distance ourselves from a firm that was in fact actively implying such useful connections.
You can easily envision situations where closeness to the USG would be a negative. Unfriendly foreign authorities might not be able to effectively harass our diplomats, but they can take out their frustrations on U.S. firms or their local employees.
There is also a little disagreement about how much the general image matters anyway. The numbers seem soft and volatile. IMO, any opinion that can change week-to-week based on external events is not firmly held or predictive of behavior. Mr. Reinhart mentioned an article in the NYT that questioned the efficacy of a being ostensibly popular. (He did not agree with most of it, BTW, and the extrapolations in this paragraph are mine, not his.)Things like cooperation with U.S. policies and sales of U.S. products seem unaffected by the vicissitudes of popularity. I have come to believe that public diplomacy can be very effective in specific areas and subjects, but is less useful with the general. In fact, I think that the general questions re favorability or approval of the U.S. are almost useless, especially when done across cultures that have a variety of ways of answering questions and interacting with researchers.
All things considered, I think the best things American business can do to improve America’s image is to make quality products, lead their businesses ethnically and respect local laws, culture & customs. We can cooperate where appropriate, and we do all the time, but business is not going to become some kind of PD auxiliary and neither business nor government should want it to.
I know that I am giving a negative accounting. Let me mitigate that a little. We already have succeeded. USG cooperation with U.S. businesses is brilliant. I know that from personal experience. I have worked with American firms since my first post in the FS. They sponsor many of our events and in the process build their own images and get exposure for their products. U.S. businesses participate in our symposiums and share their experience. We all benefit. Of course, American businesses directly sponsor exchanges, investments, technology transfers and all tolled they certainly make a much greater impression on the world than our comparatively underfunded and understaffed efforts. They do these things for good business reasons.
Cooperation is good and where it makes sense it has been going on since before the founding of our Republic. Ben Franklin, our first diplomat, combined representation of government with business. John Adams was less successful as a diplomat because he couldn’t really grasp the interconnections. Read any of their biographies and you will be struck at how similar things were so long ago. We have been doing it. I just don’t see how business-government cooperation can be significantly expanded in the PR area. We in government would have to ask ourselves what business hoped to get from the expanded partnership (i.e. influence). Business leaders would have to ask what government wanted (i.e. money). And if all of us were thoughtful and honest the answers might make us rightfully cautious in pushing too hard for more. Some things you shouldn’t do, even though you can and some separate things should not be too intimately mixed.
BTW – that is not Mr. Reinhard in the picture at top. I just got a nice angle on the podium to show both the room and the nice day outside. The middle picture shows some of the building on the SU campus. On the bottom is an interesting arch along the Erie Canal route.
We talked about the public diplomacy surrounding climate change at the Public Diplomacy Symposium at Syracuse University. Karen Akerlof from George Mason based her talk on a report called Global Warming’s Six Americas, which segmented the American public by their belief in global warming and stated commitment to doing something about it.
I will let you read the report at the link above. Ms. Akerlof pointed out that these diverse groups had more in common in their actions than in their beliefs. For example, those who were dismissive of global warming were MORE likely to do things like drive fuel efficient cars, weather-strip their houses and conserve energy in general. You could speculate that they were more motivated by the desire to save money than save the earth, but this reveals the biggest challenges in public relations/public diplomacy – people often do NOT act on their expressed beliefs.
Public affairs professionals like to think that if we can convince people of the righteousness of our positions their behaviors will change in favorable directions, but the relationship between good will and good deeds is not strong. In fact the gap between what people say they want to do and what they really do is probably the single most common inspiration for literature, myths and self-help books.
People are Perfidious
This is the gap between what people SAY – i.e. their stated preferences – and what they DO – i.e. their revealed preferences. People don’t tell the truth to opinion pollsters when talking about complex issues. I won’t call it hypocrisy or dishonesty because it goes deeper than that simple explanation.
People often don’t know what they really think because they haven’t thought through all aspects of most issues. When asked, they to follow along the familiar ruts of what they think others approve.They might even claim that they feel strongly about it but that doesn’t necessarily indicate their own commitment or their willingness to follow through. It gets worse when we become more political.
Politics does not REQUIRE strong commitment or follow up among most supporters. At a cost of about an hour of their time otherwise uncommitted individuals can convince themselves of their virtue once every two or four years and then do not much but complain and make demands in between. Politicians figured this out long ago (read about it in what Tocqueville wrong in 1830), so they flatter and pander to the uncommitted by giving them an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Focus on a one-time easy to do action works well campaigns. The skill level required to make a mark on a ballot or pull a lever on a machine is not high. But is not a good way to govern or get things done in general.
A Slowly Warming Oven
Climate change is perhaps the place where the one-time, short-term rhetorical – the political campaign – commitment works LEAST well. The diffuse, slow-motion unfolding of climate change is almost the opposite of a political process. In climate change, you have to pay the costs up-front and personally. However, you may never get a personal payoff and the results of your work and sacrifice may not come for many years, may not happen near you and may not be apparently connected to your actions. In fact, I cannot think of situation LESS likely to inspire consistent action on the part of individuals. Mark Meisner, Another of the SU panelist, laid it out nicely. He said that the climate debate is hard because of doubts related to complexity, distance, time, visibility, responsibly and consequences. To me this just means that we’re cooked on this one.
Advocates for climate change action missed major inflection point in the climate debate that happened a few months ago. Until this year, they had a politically based task. They had to convince people to SAY they believed climate change was real and that it represented a danger. This task was facilitated by the easy identification of villains. Global warming deniers (following the construction “Holocaust deniers”) could be attacked. It was implied that if these guys would just recognize the truth, the problem could be solved. But this is wrong. Global warming deniers did not cause the problem and they cannot fix it because global warming is a physical problem that requires real, as opposed to political, action. AND it requires long-term commitment, not mere involvement.
The inflection point that occurred in the debate this year is that almost everybody now recognizes the problem, at least rhetorically. The convincing part of the public diplomacy worked. Now we have moved to the “so what do we DO?” stage. This is harder.
Easier to Identify a Problem than to Agree on Solutions
Let me lay it out. We now agree on the diagnosis of the problem, but we strongly disagree about what we should do, when we should do it, who will pay for it and who is responsible of taking the needed steps. We have moved beyond the political phase of the problem and are now in the governance phase. They require different skills and methods.
On the one hand, this is to the advantage of the U.S. Other countries have sanctimoniously hidden behind the U.S. for too long. We didn’t agree to Kyoto, but Kyoto didn’t work anyway. Those that did agree to Kyoto generally reduced their CO2 emissions LESS since 2000 than we did. It is the difference between the political and the operational paradigms. In the political paradigm you get credit for what you say you are gonna do. In the operational paradigm you only get credit for what you actually accomplish. America has been doing much better in the reality than in the perception of environmental progress. So as a public diplomat, my life has become a bit easier because we can more easily talk about our practical success. Clearing away the cover, calling the practical bluff of our detractors will be satisfying.
Good Decisions Require Good Information, Incentives
But my anticipated joy at rhetorical victories in the public diplomacy game is mitigated by the anxiety I feel as someone concerned about the real environment. I am resigned to the fact that there will be climate change. We cannot avoid it. How much it bites depends more on technological developments than on political will. Politicians can do two things to help. They can raise the price of carbon, which will encourage alternatives, and they can reduce opposition to nuclear power. But both these things have political costs, so I expect less help from this sector.
The atmosphere doesn’t care if you say you are an environmentalist. It doesn’t make allowances for the poor nor does it give credit for good intentions. It is not impressed by celebrities. You cannot make progress by changing accounting procedures, borrowing from the future or blaming the past. You cannot get credit for what you didn’t do and your good works will often by obvious to nobody. In short, the natural environment is a very un-political environment.
Fortunately, the American people are greater than American politics, or as l like to say, the American nation is greater than the American government. This is true of other countries too. We are developing new technologies and new techniques. The imagination, innovation & intelligence of the people will produce good solutions if they have the right incentives and information. Environmental protection is one of the places where market-based incentives and information is insufficient because we are dealing with external costs and long term consequences. Government’s role is to make the needed adjustments in information and incentives, so that individuals and firms make realistic decisions. But the authorities must resist the temptation to pick winners and losers and micro-manage.
Politicians & public affairs campaigns play indispensable support roles by creating conditions favorable to development, but they develop nothing by themselves.
In the end, what you have done really is more important than what you say you are going to do.
Chicken & Pigs; Eggs & Ham
Do you recall the difference between involvement and commitment? Look at this bacon & eggs breakfast. The chicken is involved. She drops the egg and has nothing to do ever again. The pig is committed. His ass is right there on the plate. Involvement can be painless and ephemeral. Commitment is hard and permanent. You can see why it is easier to get people involved than committed.
You have to get off the Interstates. I made a few short detours on my way back from Syracuse. I only wish the weather had been a bit better. It is a lot more fun to drive if you can see better. You can see from the pictures when the weather was clearer that fall is coming to New York and Pennsylvania. Actually, it was more like winter in some places. I heard on the news that they got as much as six inches in some of the Pennsylvania hills. Never before has snow come this early. It stopped traffic at one point, as you can see from my picture. Doesn’t look like October, does it?
In Scranton was the anthracite coal museum. I didn’t have time to see the whole thing. The have a whole mine tour with an outdoor museum including miners houses etc. It would be a day-long study. I went only to the indoor museum. Anthracite is hard coal with few impurities, so it burns cleaner than other coals. It used to be important for home heating, where cleaner burning was important, but it has since been supplanted by natural gas, which is cheaper, cleaner and more convenient. Anthracite is too expensive for extensive use in power plants. Below is a small engine used in the mines.
Below is a typical miner bar. It looks a lot like working bars everywhere. Life sucked for the miners in the old days. They were not well treated by the bosses and the work was inherently nasty and dangerous. These guys were working class heroes and I can understand why they would want to hit the bars after a day in the mines.
About an hour down the road, I visited Pottsville and the Yuengling brewery. They claim that it is the oldest continuously working brewery in the U.S. It is still owned by the same family that founded in 1829. The brewery building is below.
I had my first bottle of Yuengling when I stopped Gettysburg back in 2004, on my way to pick up Mariza in VA to take her back to New Hampshire. At that time it was just a local brew, but now it is available in Northern Va. I am glad that they seem to be prospering, but it is a danger to grow too big. The firm that gets too big loses its personality and ultimately its independence. I remember that happened with Point Brewery, Leinenkugel and with G Heileman, maker of Old Style and Special Export. You can still buy those brands, but now they are just part of the bigger corporation. I mourned their passing, although their beers are still about the same and Leinies has come out with a good wheat beer. We can all get what we want in this era of mass customization, but I long for the authenticity of old brewers.
Above and below are street scenes from Pottsville. It is a cleans & cute town with lots of impressive old houses in a pretty natural setting. The one below is the kind of house they could feature in a ghost movie, IMO.
The Erie Canal was a wonder for its time. It could move stuff many miles at very low cost. Water was much more reliable than roads of those times. But it moved only as fast as a mule could walk. The golden age of canals was cut short by the advent or railroads. There were a few dead ends, such as plank roads. They were roads made of boards (planks) that elevated the traveler above the mud. They were very good for swampy areas. One of the first plank roads in the U.S. was build right here in North Syracuse. Lots of them were built and they were all the rage. But they cost a lot to construct and wore our faster than their proponent projected. If you included maintenance they were a really bad, if picturesque, idea. Their memory survives in place names.
Those days were not really that different from ours. That was also a time of great changes in technology, relationships and in their case geography. Let’s make a comparison using technological milestones. The first Apple personal computer came out in 1976 – thirty-three years ago. The Erie Canal was completed in 1825. Thirty-three years later half the U.S. had gone from wilderness to settlement. Railroads had spread. The telegraph had been invented and lines were being strung across the county, so messaged that had taken days or weeks now arrived in secondss. A dozen new states had entered the Union but the Union itself was looking shaky. A lifetime in the second quarter of the 19th Century was at least as eventful as ours. BTW, the canal had to pass over rivers with a kind of water bridge or aqueduct. Below is what they look like.
Great fortunes were made and lost betting on which technologies would come out on top. Like today, the best didn’t always win out. Sometimes you just had to jump on the one that had the most users.
I went down to part of the old Erie Canal that was left near Syracuse. Through town most of it is now filled in and forms the middle of Erie Boulevard, BTW. There is a park along much of what is left of the old canal and it is very calm and pleasant. The tow path is paved with gravel and it would make a beautiful running trail. I didn’t have time to try it out myself. I can imagine it was not so nice when it was in use. Picture the mud, mule crap, sewage and garbage. This is how it often is. We get nostalgic for the old facilities and they get better looking with time. Think of all those Civil War battlefields or medieval castles. They were once factories of war. Now they are just pretty and interesting.
A closer look at the area around the canal shows that not everything is as it was. Humans have totally remade the landscape and that goes way beyond digging the ditch that became the canal. look at my pictures above and below. The plants you see in the foreground above are phragmites, an invasive species of reed. There are acres of them in the wetlands nearby. Had you come to this place a generation ago you would have found native American cattails. The phragmites are ecosystem changing species. Look across the pond on the picture below and you see Norway spruce. They too are immigrants. We tend not to call them invasive because they are not as prolific and they are pretty. Not in the pictures but in back of me were Norway maples, which look a lot like sugar maples and are replacing them in some places. A 19th Century naturalist familiar with the fauna along the canal would be very surprised by the unfamiliar plants. I couldn’t get a good picture that showed the ruts on the hills a little farther away. Chrissy’s father explained that to me a long time ago. The cows walk around the hills in habitual ways. Over the years, they create ridges and indicate that the hill was long part of a cow pasture. Of course, the cows and even the grass is not native. Some people consider fescue invasive. Even the earthworms living in the soil were imported from Europe.
We had a weather anomaly. In Pennsylvania and much of western New York it snowed. Parts of PA got SIC inches. This is the earliest significant snow on record. A woman who drove up from nearby Ithaca said there were inches of snow there. But Syracuse was like a donut hole. It was rain or snow all around. Here it was cold, but clear, so I got a good impression of the town. It seems a nice place and Syracuse University is very charming.
We had a good symposium at SU, BTW. I will write about my impressions tomorrow.
It wasn’t the pleasant drive I envisioned. It rained all the way up past Hersey PA. Then it began to snow – snow in mid-October. Where is this global warming stuff when you need it. (Of course, I best be careful even joking about this subject. The BBC is under vitriolic attack for pointing out that the globe has not gotten any warmer since 1998. For the record, I have believed global warming is happening since around 1982. I think I even pre-date Al Gore. I believe some of it is influenced by humans and some of it is natural. It probably can be managed through a combination of mitigation and adaption. But I think the whole debate has become way too political and ideologically driven, so much so that I think truth takes a second place to politics, and when I hear that activists are trying squash information, I get annoyed.)
Anyway, it cleared up a little by the time I got to New York. It is pretty up here. The leaves are in mid-turn. They will peak soon. If the predicted rain and snow doesn’t come, maybe I can enjoy them.
On the way up I stopped at Hersey PA. You see above that even the streetlights are Hershey kisses on Chocolate Avenue. Milton Hersey, who founded the chocolate company that bears his name, was a very kind and good man. He used the profits from his firm to make life pleasant for people around him. For example, he founded a school, supported hospitals and helped make Hersey PA a place where people want to live. I won’t write all the details. Check out the article if you want to find out more. Suffice to say that there are special places in heaven for people like Milton. I bought and happily ate a Hersey bar in his honor today. Below is Hershey heaven (I guess). It is from a mural at “The Hershey Story” museum.
We took the kids up to Hershey about ten years ago to tour the plant. I got new respect for Hershey after that. There just are some firms that are better than others, usually showing the personality of a founder. Marriott is also like that. I always stay in Marriott when I can. It just seems a generous, honest and family friendly company. As long as I am endorsing good companies, I also admire Charles Schwab, Cabalas, USAA insurance & Samuel Adams beer. I hesitate to add, because people will give me some crap about it, but I also like United Airlines. They always treated me fairly, even if travel in general sucks. I don’t know if being good adds to their bottom line. I am a loyal customer of Charles Schwab, USAA, Cabalas and Marriott and I advise others to use their services, but they also happen to make things I like to use. I don’t really like Sam Adams beer, so that doesn’t do them much practical good if I admire the company. I have indeed specifically bought Hershey bars BECAUSE of the Milton Hershey legacy, but that doesn’t add up to much.
Everything else being equal, I will buy something made in America and I give specific preference to products from Wisconsin or Virginia, but everything else rarely is equal. I also understand that in this integrated world, the place of origin is hard to determine, but I never said it was logical.
On the left are products of Central New York, BTW.
On the other hand, I won’t buy gas at CITGO – even if it is cheaper – because of Hugo Chavez. I feel a little conflicted because I don’t want to hurt to good American station owners, but I cannot support that guy. Besides the other rotten things, he banned Coke Zero in Venezuela. I refuse to go to any movie made by Michael Moore or Oliver Stone and I stopped enjoying Two and a Half Men after Charlie Sheen went nuts with the 9/11 conspiracy theories, but I think these are the only non-economic, non-taste factors that influence my purchasing decisions. I suppose there are lots of unconscious associations.
Of course, we should make most of our product decisions based on the product itself. It gets way to complicated to try to figure all the permutations of good and bad. Few people are good enough in their own lives to judge the actions of firms. Besides, in the real world “Corporate Responsibility” usually just means an opportunity for some activists to shake down a firm and firms often pay protection money to politically correct groups in the name of corporate responsibility.
Above is from a rest stop along I-81 a few miles outside Syracuse.
“Corporate diplomacy can make a lasting impression. I went to a Jim Beam tasting event six or seven years ago. They told us about the lore of Bourbon, how it was invented in Kentucky, is aged in charred oak etc. I didn’t know that Bourbon cannot be aged more than around seven years, or it gets to be too strong. Scotch keeps getting better for 18 years, but Bourbon ages faster in the warmer Kentucky climate. BTW – Scotch older than 18 or Bourbon older than 7-8 is just a waste of money. It gets older and more alcoholic; it just doesn’t get any better. After the “tasting,” they offered various Bourbons for sale. I bought several bottles of more expensive whiskey than I would have purchased pre-tasting. It doesn’t take very much tasting to influence your judgment. But I still feel more favorably disposed toward Jim Beam because of their outreach and I now believe I can tell the difference between black and white label, and between “Booker,” “Baker,” “Knob Creek,” & Basil Hayden. Notice, I say “I believe”. It helps if I can see the bottle first.
The guy at the tasting admitted that most people really cannot tell the difference all the time. You would probably become a drunk before developing the true skill. Much indeed is in the presentation, but that makes sense. Most of the price you pay at a fine restaurant is in the surroundings and service and drinking the best whiskey from a dixie cup just doesn’t cut it.
All the armed services have exceeded their recruitment goals and they are recruiting higher quality than ever. The Marines managed to reach their EXPANDED goals years early. The “Washington Post” article reporting this still suffers some of the old-fashioned thinking that people are somehow driven by dire circumstance into joining up. In fact most recruits come from middle class or upper middle class backgrounds. The military no longer gets most, or even many, of its recruits from among the poor and uneducated. Unfortunately for these guys, they cannot pass the tests or requirements to get in.
Ethnically as well as economically the military looks like America.
The military is a little more rural and a little more southern than the general population. There is a lot of speculation about why this might be true. Rural people tend to be patriotic, in my experience, and they also tend to know how to use guns and operate heavy equipment. These attitudes and skills are useful in the military. As for the South, military service has been a tradition since the time of George Washington. There are also military families, among which lots of people serves and there are families where nobody does. Sociologist might explain it. Habits and attitudes cross generations.
My father was in the Army-Air Corps during WWII, but we don’t have a military tradition in our family. I encouraged Alex and Espen to think about the military, but so far they have decided not to. I was ineligible for military service because of what the doctor called an ulcer when I was sixteen. It is a funny story now. I was less amused then. I tried to join in 1982 as an Airforce officer. I passed all the tests and went in for my physical, which I thought would be a piece of cake. It was. My blood pressure was low. I didn’t have any physical problems. BUT I had “history.” Back when I was sixteen I coughed up some blood. It scared me and my mother so to the doctor we went. The doctor at the time called it an ulcer. I drank a lot of milk and ate bland foods for a while and it went away – forever. But the diagnosis stuck. Ten years later, the military doctors told me that I was too sick for military service and there was nothing I could do to prove otherwise because the records said so. Just as well. I went in the FS a couple years later and it was a good fit. Beyond that, my peculiar talents are probably better employed in this line of work. Still, I think I would have looked good in that blue uniform.
I worked with military attaches a lot in my career, but it was my year with the Marines in Iraq that gave me real first-hand experience with the military in action in their actual environment. I was impressed by the Marines I got to know and had the privilege of working with in Iraq. The enlisted men are sometimes just kids, but they are a lot more responsible than those you find working at McDonald’s or not working at all. You can trust your life to them; I did. The way they deploy to respond to threats is poetry in motion. The officers are smart, but practical and unpretentious. Generally, the military is better educated and better behaved than comparable civilians. Almost all the enlisted men have HS diplomas, at least. Nearly all the officers are college educated and many have advanced degrees.
I get angry when I see the stereotypical portrayal of military officers in much of the media. It is even worse when pinheaded pseudo intellectuals on elite campuses shun connections with the military or out of touch weirdos in places like San Francisco actually try to ban recruiting. The negative image that engenders is persuasive in many parts of our society and it keeps lots of kids from even thinking the military. It is a loss to them and our country.
There is a saying that if a country that separates its soldiers from its intellectuals will get fools do the fighting and cowards do the thinking. I know from experience that the people doing the fighting are NOT fools. It is a shame if some of our self-described intellectuals don’t get to be all they could be because of their own prejudices and outdated ideas.
Now more young Americans are taking up the challenge. The few, the proud have become more numerous and that is good for them and for all of us.
I am on a panel about public diplomacy at the Second Public Diplomacy Symposium at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York on October 16. Since it is a panel DISCUSSION I don’t want to say too much initially in order to let the discussion develop in ways favored by the participants. The reflections on public diplomacy on the blog this week are some of the ways I am working through the issues. Sorry for all the overlap. I have to produce hours of thought to yield a few minutes of talk. It takes a lot of preparation to be spontaneous.
Below is what I plan to use as an introduction. The PowerPoint for the presentation is available at this link.
Social Media & Public Diplomacy
Above are workers constructing the new Institute of Peace building across from my office. They use a variety of tools for their work, choosing the most appropriate for the job at hand. The TASK is the important thing. The tools are just a way to get the job done. A carpenter does not have a specific “hammer strategy.” We should not have a specific Facebook or Twitter strategy. Our PD TOOLS should be used … as tools – part of a tool box or portfolio. Use the ones that work at the right place and time; don’t develop a strategy for them.
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You are catching me at a time of indecision. I spent more than twenty-five years working in public diplomacy and have been a pioneer in State Department innovative use of the new media; at least they gave me a couple awards that said so. But I have doubts. Electronic distribution & the social/interactive media is not the game changer I hoped. On reflection, I think we leaned too much about technology and not enough on the social and anthropological aspects of the social media. Technology has made it easy to reach large numbers of people, but it doesn’t mean they are paying attention, turning our information into useful knowledge or doing something new or different based on what they get from us.
We have to do a lot of rethinking but it is hard to think when we are beguiled and distracted by the promise of technology. So let’s set aside all the latest techno-developments and think about the SOCIAL media from the human and audience perspective. Since this will be a DISCUSSION and I have only a few minutes to provoke your questions, let me give you the seven truths about public diplomacy and social media.
1. Social – less about technologies and more about social interactions with people.
2. Iterative – It is a continuous learning, iterative process, not a plan and not something that can be delegated or finished.
3. Engaged – You want to influence others AND you are willing to be influenced by others.
4. Community -based – Build a community & be part of a community. Figure out what you can contribute to the community. People make decisions in the contexts of their communities.
5. Simultaneously Inclusive & Exclusive – A community is both inclusive of its members and exclusive to others. You attract nobody if you appeal to everybody. You have to earn membership in any community worth being a member.
6. Personal – Editors and marketers have tried for years to homogenize for the mass market. Niche markets – and the new media is just a series of niche markets – requires personality. There is no such thing as a world product. Even the ubiquitous Coca-Cola varies by region and country. We engage a series of niche markets. This means that we have to work through our country-posts, with people immersed in local cultures, politics and sensibilities and has obvious implications for a Washington-based PD messaging strategy.
7. Fun – We underestimate the importance of fun & games. People have choices in the new media. They often engage because it is fun and if you bore them they will wander off.
So these are the things that I think shape our use of social media. Let’s talk.
