Tag: reflections

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Homelessness

A homeless man killed the trees in the pictures.   I saw him carving on them with a pocket knife a couple years back.   He moved on when I asked him about it, but he came back.   The police can’t do anything about these kinds of incidents and they discourage citizens from even giving the miscreants a hard time.   I have not seen the guy around since I have been back from Iraq.   I hope he is gone for good, but maybe he is taking the winter off.   How many trees he killed all together I don’t know, nor do I have any clues on the motivation.  Maybe he was just bored.   Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.  There are dozens of dead trees about the right age in the neighborhood, but there are other possible causes.   

There are a lot fewer homeless around here than there used to be when I first moved to Washington.  I don’t know if they are gone or just gone someplace else.  There used to be a guy called Mitch Snyder, who ran a local homeless shelter. He deployed the homeless around the Washington area with the expressed purpose of making a kind of political statement.  I moved to Washington during the heyday of his activities, so I suppose some of my impression of the time was part of his street theater. 

I think it was back in 1999 when I was running near the Lincoln Memorial and noticed an unusual number of street people.   As I turned toward the Korean Memorial, I ran into a television production crew.  They were filming for a TV show called “West Wing,” with Martin Sheen playing President Jed Bartlet.  The guys lying around on the ground were ersatz homeless – i.e. actors. I watched the episode they were filming later in the season.   It was about the homeless in Washington. It was ironic that they had to hire their own homeless TV props to create the visual image they wanted.   Homelessness dropped a lot, and we have better responses than we did before, but it doesn’t take very many homeless to make a problem.

There is a legitimate argument about rights. All citizens have the right to use public spaces, but the public has the right to expect each individual to behave in a reasonable way. A homeless man is both a victim and a perpetrator. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan commented, we defined deviancy down and learned to accept that people either w/o the ability or motivation to control their weird behavior could dominate our public spaces.  Bad behavior feeds on itself and engenders worse behavior. During the height of the homeless epidemic during the 1980s, many public parks were rendered unusable for ordinary citizens.  Kids couldn’t use the playgrounds.   A stroll in the park was like running a gauntlet of beggars.  When you lose public space, you lose public spirit and weaken the community.    

It is better now.  The homeless are fewer, but it is frustrating when one guy is responsible for thousands of dollars of slow release vandalism that deprives future generations of shade on hot summer days.  Sometimes we tolerate too much.

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New Tricks for Old Dogs

The New Year season is a time for reflection.  I have been thinking a lot about the new communication technologies and my job.  I know this is boring to some/most of the people reading this, and I know that I am being repetitive, but I still don’t have this sorted out in my own mind.

Decisions are easy when values and priorities are clear.  The hard part is figuring them out.  
 
I got along well with Internet in its early incarnations.  It fulfilled dreams of my youth.   They were nerdy dreams, I admit.  I dreamed of a comprehensive searchable data base that could answer all my questions if I posed them correctly.   We got it. I wanted easy access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind.  We got that too. I dreamed of instant communications networks to pass new ideas.  Got it. 
 
My dreams were myopic, just projections and amplifications of what I already knew.   But the world doesn’t stop and innovations spawn unexpected changes.  The Internet shot clean past my slow moving dreams. 

Internet revolutionized the pursuit of knowledge in mostly good ways.   You can find out almost anything you want to know and connectedness of the web is increasing scientific and practical knowledge immensely.    Knowledge and politics, however, don’t always intersect.  Metastasizing politics on the Internet has been less a good thing.  Let me clarify with an example. 
 
Blogs made it possible to write about your opinions and experience and easily publish it for others to read and comment.  This is just an old technique adapted to new technologies.   It is kind of the Federalist Papers on steroids; a quicker marketplace of ideas, this I like.   But it didn’t stay on that high plane very long.  The messages slid downhill and became shorter and more vitriolic.
 
The blogosphere and cyberspace in general experienced a kind of evolution, where selection favored the nastiest and the most extreme.  Rather than a universe of ideas, it debauched into a multiverse of pseudo-intellectual hostility.   Many of the online communities became intolerantly self-policing, driving out anybody with divergent views and in the process increasingly coarsening the rhetoric.  Too many online communities became autoerotic circles of hatred, where participants confirmed each other’s prejudices, sharpened their collective teeth, and pulled their groups farther out of the mainstream.  We often cannot persuade or be persuaded by others because we occupy completely different dimensions.  
 
There used to be a saying that you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. The new media has developed different fact-universes, each with its own specific sets.  This is a challenge and it gets worse. 
 
Now we have all the interactive systems, the Facebooks etc, Twitter as well as interactive gaming.   I just don’t know what to do with them.  I am not sure it is possible for government based public affairs (i.e. someone in my job) to use these technologies because they are so labor intensive and the messages so often intensely idiosyncratic. 
 
Consider the strengths and weaknesses of a government information operation.  My job is to explain the U.S. and U.S. policies to people in other countries.   In what we see in retrospect as the golden age (it didn’t seem that back then), we had certain advantages.   Most important was that government had a monopoly over some sorts of information, but there were other structural advantages.   The technologies favored the one speaker to many listeners paradigm, so a relatively small number of writers could reach a large number of readers/listeners/viewers.   Beyond that, our enemies were easy to identify and possible to count.  The Soviets produced a lot of deceitful propaganda, but we could usually find the return address if we looked hard enough. 
 
None of this is true anymore.  The government no longer has information dominance and is often not the first or the best source even of things about its own activities.   The information market has splintered into millions of pieces and our adversaries are harder to identify.   Essentially, we went from a situation with one big and dangerous bad guy (or a couple of them) to a world where there are thousands of little ones.   The dragon has been replaced by insects, each one inconsequential, but collectively heavier and more intractable.  And they are more quickly adaptive to changing circumstances.  You could always expect the Soviets to be slow and ponderous, not so our new adversaries.  
 
When it was one-to-many communications, we happy few at State or USIA had a chance to move the communication needle.   In the one-to-dozens communication environment, we just don’t have enough people and never will.   We can get the occasional “viral” hit, but not with any predictability.  
 
I think we still have a chance.  The Internet is starved for content.  We can produce content and/or pictures.  We can also build relationships that might leverage to larger populations.    We can succeed, but I am worried that we will not.  I am also worried that I cannot go along on this ride.   I have been in this business for a quarter century, but I am afraid I might have reached a river I cannot cross.   I have always believed that with the proper tools and permission, I could make a difference and sometimes I have succeeded.   I have not always had the means, but I always had the vision, at least I thought I did.  

My vision is now failing with the newest technologies.   I can understand how something like Twitter can be used to organize a demonstration, communicate sports scores or stock averages, or help maintain an existing social network, but I cannot figure out how we can pass the nuanced explanation of policy over these sorts of networks, nor can I see a way that government officials like me and my colleagues make ourselves trusted participants in enough social networks to make a significant impact.  I can understand the theoretical potential for online communities, but cannot stand the profound lameness of “worlds” like Second Life and I cannot figure out its wider impact.  It is a big world out there and our efforts may just be a p*ss in the ocean.  

This worries me.  I don’t know whether it cannot be done in general or if it is just ME that cannot do it.  I have a responsibility to add value and I always promised myself that I would not hang around after I outlived my usefulness.    I don’t want to try to apply yesterday’s solutions to tomorrow’s problems.    It is funny how things come in circles.  I am having the equivalent of adolescent angst at my age. 
 
I guess I will figure it out, or more correctly I will find people who have figured it out to work with me.  I really don’t understand much of anything, but I have always had the good fortune to find people who do and I have been able to bring out their talents.   I add value the old fashioned way – through good people.  Maybe the old tricks still work for the old dog.  When I cannot do that anymore I will go quietly into that good night – someday, but probably not today.   I still have a lot of thinking to do.

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Flying to Doha

Another post out of chronological order. 

Flying

I dreaded the flight to Doha.  When I got to the ticket counter, they couldn’t find my reservation.   I had a momentary feeling of guilt mixed with relief that I could avoid the trip.   It would not really have helped, however, I would just have to go the next day and meanwhile it would have been a lot of trouble.  They found my reservation, but not my seat so I got an exit row with a lot of leg room.  Sometimes it pays to be oppressed and forgotten.   I got better than I expected.

I was listening to an audio book re expectations.  People enjoy more things that are more expensive or harder to get.  The placebo effect works because of expectations.  People get real fake drugs because they think they will.  And they get better relief from more expensive placebos because they perceive higher quality.  You get what you pay for.  Maybe it will never be possible to get really cheap drugs because people may get the relief they expect and they expect less when things cost less.

The mind makes it so.  I was telling Chrissy re conditions in Iraq.  As I described the sand, snakes, scorpions, heat, hardness, fumes, bouncing and hazards, I realized how objectively it was horrible.  But it was not that bad.   All these bad things were balanced by the sense of purpose, friendship, the experience and the fact that I chose to do it. The interesting distinction is that the hard parts are all objective.  It is hot, or not, sandy or not etc.   The things that mitigate it are all subjective.  Within broad bounds, the actual physical experience is a lot less important than how you chose to react. 

Doha 1:  Arabs Like America (When They Actually Experience It)

I talked to a young guy called Josef on the plane.   He is native to these parts but currently attending Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.    He confirmed some of what I heard about Doha.   He proudly told me that the natives all get things like free health care and scholarships.  Many attend university in foreign countries as he did.   They get this with the added benefit of not paying taxes.  All this largess is made possible by the hydrocarbons created by plants and animals in the days of the dinosaurs and before.   Talk about the luck of the draw.  

I am glad, BTW, that he brings some of this Doha money to Virginia paying out-of-state tuition.   It is still a good deal.  Education is a big deal of us in the U.S.   Last year we had more foreign students than ever in the U.S.  and the U.S. hosts more foreign students than any other country.    We had a little dip after 9/11, because of visa problems etc.  but we made up for it. 

Josef told me that he loved America.   Since he started the conversation and seemed so enthusiastic, I will accept that he didn’t say that only for my benefit.    Personal experience trumps the statistical study and he said that Americans all over our country (he travelled a lot) were nice to him and welcoming.   Now if we could just get all those other billion people to have a similar experience with real America, we wouldn’t have an image problem.

Doha 2:  Caste Systems

 It is an odd mix.   All the stewardesses (there seem to have been no men) on Qatar Airlines are Asian.   I think they were Indonesian.    All the people doing construction looked like South Asians and there people from the Philippines crowded the airport on their way to work as domestic laborers.    The population of native Doha people is small and they don’t seem to take part in the everyday work of the country.   

It is not so strange that immigrants do the less attractive jobs in a country as rich as this, but it is odd, IMO, how there seems to be such complete national specialization.    I understand that my observations are limited and I should not extrapolate to the general condition from the small sample I have seen, but I have never seen anything like it.   It is all very neat.  I don’t know if it results from a plan or is just self organizing and auto correlated.   Both things must be at work. 

I thought re alternative histories.  What if WWI had not sapped the power of the British and they had held onto their empire for a longer time.    Given the general trends, it probably would have developed into something more integrated and you may well have others from the empire making their way up the social and political latter.   It happened in the Roman Empire, as full citizenship was extended until it encompassed the entire empire, so much so that people from the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor, speaking Greek still called themselves Roman a thousand years after the German barbarians kicked out the last emperor in Rome itself.

Anyway, in the age of imperialism, a place like Qatar or the oil rich and easily defended deserts of Arabia would be controlled by some imperial power.   I figure the Brits would have it, but given the evolution mentioned above, it might be actually run by Indians, citizens of a British Empire with an increasingly Indian accent.   That integration of Arabia with South Asia may yet happen.   If they keep on coming, there will be more of them than the ostensible natives. 

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Selling Them the Rope

It reminds me of that old horror movie where the babysitter calls the cops to ask for help with a stalker who has been making threatening calls.   When they manage to trace the call, however, the find out that it is coming from inside her house. 

My search for the root problem of America’s image abroad has brought me right back home. That some of the most scurrilous attacks on our values & institutions come from within our country will come as no surprise to anybody who has seen a Michael Moore movie.   Yesterday night I was watching “American Dad” with the boys.   It is simply horrible.   This episode could have been funded by Al Qaida.   It portrayed American officials as torturers who liked to do it so much that they would sponsor a telethon to raise funds to continue it.   Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly.  Much of the Sunday night lineup is like that.   “American Dad” is preceded by “Family Guy.”  This one has some very funny vignettes, which are the Trojan horses that get the propaganda through the gates, but the overall theme is that the average American “family man” is a selfish, stupid, pervert who thinks only in terms of his own short term gain, short term because he is too dumb to plan much beyond tomorrow anyway. 

People accuse me of being an old crank when I complain about these things.   Some even imply that I am against free speech.  This is unfair.  Free speech is useful because it allows us all to judge the good from the bad.   Free speech means that people have the right to voice their opinions, whether they are reasonable or stupid.  But not all speech is equal.   We all have the duty to assess the contentions of others.   I would not censor those things I mention above, but I do think intelligent people have to point out how stupid, misguided and harmful they are.   It is not just good fun and it is not just satire.   These are consistently hateful and misguided attacks.  Just because we have to tolerate it doesn’t mean we have to like it or support it.

People usually claim more sophistication than they manifest.  Most don’t pay attention to the news and few people in the world could pass even a simple multiple choice test about American foreign policy.  American cultural products, however, sell well overseas.   We export a lot of good quality material.   But it comes with a heavy leavening of the sort of crap that coats our television sets so many nights and what do you think gets the higher ratings?   It is not hard to understand why a lot of people worldwide would dislike us if their media images of ordinary Americans come from “American Dad,” “Desperate Housewives” & reruns of “Jerry Springer.”   We Americans presumably have real world comparisons to counteract the media images, yet we still harbor prejudices about Americans from different places.  What about people who don’t know Americans in person?

Perception is reality.

Imagine if you watched a television series made by the cultural elite of another country that consistently portrayed their leaders as horribly corrupt, bigoted & vicious, and their ordinary people as stupid, shallow and dishonest.  Imagine if all the false and pejorative stereotypes you had heard were confirmed by their own media … repeatedly.    What would you think?   Defenders of this trash say that you would be really impressed that our hypothetical foreign friends were so open that they welcomed this kind of attack on themselves.   Would you really?  Does holding the tolerant high ground make you immune from real world ridicule?  Or does it just invite offense as the next insult tops the previous?  If your spouse ridiculed you and pointed out all your faults in front of your friends every time you went out, would that improve the reputation of your family?  The best you could get is someone who calls down a plague on both of you. 

It is like the story of the drunk who smashes into his wife’s car parked in the driveway and comforts himself with the idea that the other car is as wrecked as his. 

A good test of fairness, BTW, is substitution.   Watch one of these “satires” and substitute for the American any other nationality, ethnic group or affiliation.   How long would an Arab “Family Guy” stay on the air?  Is it still funny or is it just plain mean and bigoted?

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Hard Times & Rich A-Holes

The economy is in unmistakable decline and it is astonishing how fast perceptions change.   Although my investments have tanked like everybody else’s, I have to caveat that my personal exposure to the downturn is not immediately significant and  while I suppose the value of my forests has declined, land endures and gives you a feeling of secure permanence not possible with paper assets.

Below is Pentagon Mall in Arlington.  Nice food court.  Still crowded.

I have some prejudices that I should also state up front.  I don’t like ostentatious displays of wealth and I observe that the culture has coarsened in the last few decades.   People are no longer self conscious about bragging about their wealth.   There are all sorts of programs on TV where rich celebrities brazenly show off their riches.   Nearer to home, the Northern Virginia countryside is studded with giant houses with expensive cars parked outside.   I am glad that affluence has spread so widely in America, but the spread of opulence is not so welcome.     It is even worse that much of this opulence was bought on credit.   I don’t know if we are at the end of the long economic boom that started in 1982, but after twenty-five years of good times (with tame downturns), we have forgotten what hard times look like.   The long run of good times has also decoupled wealth from work in a pernicious way. 

Rock stars, and their equivalents in the corporate, sports or entertainment world, make such piles of money so quickly that it degrades the hard work of ordinary people.   Add to this a capricious legal system that can reward someone for his own stupid behavior or bankrupt a prudent person and you have a really noxious cultural stew.   Rock stars, big bosses, big payout plaintiffs and millionaire sport stars are rare.   But they cast a long shadow and their influence is enhanced by a media that loves them while exposing all their flaws and weaknesses. 

It bothers me that entertainers can do drugs and treat the people around then like crap and still be admired for their ability to bring in the money.  Need I mention executives in private jets going to ask Washington for a hand?  I find it offensive that sports stars can literally be criminals and still rake in the big bucks.   (Green Bay’s great halfback, Paul Hornung, was suspended at the height of his career for betting relatively small sums on football games.  He also, BTW, earlier had to do his service in the army and play football while on weekend passes.)

I don’t object to people having money in general.  In fact, I support it. Making money is a laudable goal.  If you are earning money you are probably producing something other people need or want.  But those who earn the big bucks should be circumspect in what they do with it and how they behave in public. 

The irony of today’s conspicuous consumption is that it is to some extent based on the egalitarian idea that we are all the same.   Greater wealth, whether that comes from money, talent or just good luck, SHOULD bring greater responsibility.  But if we are all the same, those who just happen to have more have no special responsibilities. There was never a golden age where the rich & famous behaved in a really responsible way, but it has indeed got worse.    

Below – Rowing practice outside GWU in Washington.

I recently read a biography of Dean Acheson.   He traveled in some rich and privileged circles and the book gave me some insights.   In those days, students at the best universities lived in relative simplicity.    The established rich to some extent hid their wealth and played down their consumption.   There was a general acceptance that young people should experience some sort of Spartan-like upbringing.    The good man taught his son that he was special and had a special responsibility.   If this was often hypocritical, at least is was the acknowledged norm.

Hypocrisy, after all, is the tribute vice pays to virtue.   In our lifetimes we have elevated hypocrisy and judging to the level of major taboos.   We want people to be genuine and be themselves.  The problem is that when people only aspire to be themselves, they set their sights way too low.   We should all want to be better than we are and this means that we are not as good today as we hope we will be tomorrow.  It also means that some people are not as good as others. We can make distinctions.  We must make distinctions. We need to be more judgmental because our non-judgmental ethic has let the a-holes off the hook.  It has allowed crass low-lives to assert that they are just as good – better – than most others because they have cash.  Tom Arnold said of himself and his then wife the attractive Rosanne Barr, ‘‘We’re America’s worst nightmare: white trash with money!”  YES!  That is a nightmare and it has become much more widespread.  Let’s wake up from this nightmare. I expect that when you get more than others you also take on more obligation to act responsibly.  If that is an elitist idea, I embrace the concept. 

Since the onset of the current economic crisis, we have heard more talk about thrift and prudence.   It is no longer considered clever to have borrowed and deployed money you couldn’t pay back.   I hope that people will soon come to look down on and judge negatively huge displays of wealth and so devalue them.  In hard times people should be ashamed to parade their good fortune.  There are better things to do with your money than buy bling and attend gatherings of the rich, famous and beautiful.  I have no illusions that such things will go away, but I would be content to have it less in our faces. 

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PTSD, Iraq & the Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Most of the time when the shooting starts, State Department evacuates Embassies and gets its people out of harm’s way.  We were sent to Iraq in the opposite direction with the risks well-known and acknowledged.   This represents a big change that State is still trying to understand.   They are trying to find out more about how such an assignment affects the people involved, so the high stress out briefing I went to today at FSI has a double purpose: to help us reintegrate and to get some ideas on what happened to us over there.

They told us that employees often have more trouble coming home than they did going over.   Life is the war zone is exciting or at least active.   You feel like you are doing something special and that you are a big deal.  At home, you are just an ordinary guy.   You must also reintegrate the people you love.  Things have changed.    Experts identify a whole range of situations ranging from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to more mild forms of just feeling a little strange.    PTSD, BTW, is not rare even among people who have not been to war zones.  We were told that 5% of men and 10% of women NOT deployed in overtly traumatic conditions will still suffer from the symptoms. 

I was lucky.  I experienced few traumatic events and I think I have reintegrated fairly well.   I do feel some of the things they mention in the course.   I have a little trouble focusing and I lose track of the things I am doing more than I remember doing before.    But I think that is also the simple result of the ordinary changes I am going through.   I am still waiting for some of my clearances; I still don’t have my remote access and I am still not settled into my new job.  More precisely, I am kind of between jobs since I have the CENTCOM assessment taking most of my time when I am trying to check into my new job.   I will spend the next couple of weeks in Doha, which postpones the real start of my new job.   Anyway, whenever compare the first weeks of a new job to the last weeks of a past successful one, it will inevitably seem more confused and chaotic. Presumably you get better at your job so the end is better organized than the start.

An experience like Iraq reveals (if not builds) character. We all agreed that some people should not be allowed to come to Iraq and that our eagerness to get willing people at the posts lets some of them through the filter.   Some people are not emotionally robust enough for the stress and many are not physically fit enough.  You don’t have to be Arnold Swartzenegger, but you do have to wear body armor, carry your own gear, and jump out of helicopters & into MRAPS.  You also have to be able to take the temperatures and the pounding that comes from ordinary life and travel in Iraq.

The experts say that people returning from posts such as Iraq are sometimes crabbier, less engaged and they think life is less colorful or interesting.   This passes in normal cases.   I also don’t think this is a problem for me (although maybe I don’t notice my crabbiness.)    My time in Iraq made me appreciate more the things I had here in America.  I had a network of support in the family and I did a few things right, w/o even planning it.   My forestry interest tied me to something long term and rooted (literally) and the blogging was an excellent outlet.   The experts say that telling your story helps calm and put your mind straight.  I guess it is like the old man in the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” who periodically feels the need to share (inflict) his experience with somebody else.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

As a career FSO, I have come home several times.   I was happy to get out of Iraq.  I loved the job and worked with great people on an important job.  I regret leaving them and the sense of duty, but Iraq as a place holds no attraction for me.  Forget the war.  I like living trees and verdant hills.  I just don’t like barren deserts and I don’t like that extreme heat.  I felt no sadness leaving Iraq.  I really liked Norway and Poland and was sad to leave those places.  The hardest homecoming for me and the family was when we left Krakow.   That was an important job too AND I felt at home in Poland.   Beyond that, I came back to a job (in the ops center) that I didn’t like and beyond all those things, the family had some adjustment issues at the same time.   Even I could tell that I was crabby, troubled and troublesome back then.  I do agree with the general proposition that coming back is often harder than going over, probably because you think it should just be a piece of cake.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

(Maybe those who read Coleridge don’t really need the course.  He seems to have figured it out and expressed it better.)

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Arbitrary Coherence

I am reading “Predictably Irrational” about how we often make decisions not based on rational criteria w/o knowing it.   I have been interested the effects of irrational choices and random chance in decision making for many years.  If you recognize your bias and sources of uncertainty, you can make better decisions.   The down side of recognizing these limitations is … recognizing these limitations.   Everybody likes to believe they are rational and responsible.  It is also very hard to come to grips with the uncertainly inherent in all decisions.   

Uncertainty is part of ALL decisions.   If everything is cut and dry certain, there is no need for a decision.   You can just go with an ordinary rule of thumb or habit.  I don’t really decide to put on my seatbelt or brush my teeth in the morning.  I just do it.   You don’t want to make complicated decisions about every little event.  It would drive you crazy. But the habits and routines that easy life also can be traps.

Theory in decision making is starting to catch up with what many persuaders and decision makers have known intuitively for years.   Take the marketing example when a store offers good-better-best in a product line.    Markets know that given three choices, most people are likely to choose the middle one unless they have a strong prior preference. Clever marketers have the highest margin on the middle one. But how does this work?

It has to do with setting an anchor.   All values are really arbitrary. What you pay for a product is what you and others are willing to pay.  There is no “real” value.   How do you know what to pay?  By comparison.   But that comparison doesn’t need to be rational.   When you go out to buy something, you often don’t know what it is “worth.”   If the merchant can fix a price of say $100 in your mind, when he offers $100-10 or $90 you think it is a good deal.   If you had been fixed on $80 it would be a bad deal.  That is why the three choices work.  Few people buy the cheap one and almost nobody buys the most expensive.  The comparison makes you think the middle one has the reasonable price.   We do that all the time with everything. We base our estimates on relative prices and we are arbitarily consistent among them. It is a good idea sometimes to ask yourself what it is you really want and make decisions based on them.  This is easier said than done.   Effective people do it better than the success-challenged, but nobody is as rational as he thinks.

A lot of life is habit and random chance.  But if you recognize what you cannot control, you can have better control over the other things. If you recognize the role of chance, you can arrange your affairs in to take advantage of the probabilities. They say luck is where preparation meets opportunity.   

I recently finished “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell.   He wrote “the Tipping Point,” which was a very good book and “Blink,” not so much.  I didn’t find much new in the book, but Gladwell puts it together well and tells good stories.     Gladwell, IMO, takes the analysis a bit too far.  It is true that there are more people who COULD do particular jobs than CAN do them.   This is the story of life.   More things always can happen than do happen.     No doubt the real winners have lots of advantages and luck.   Very often, however, you can find these only in retrospect.   There is dynamic where successful people both take advantage of opportunities and create them.     The other problem with outliers is general is the small numbers lead to deceptive conclusions.    It stands to reason the very few or the one at the very top required lots of talent, advantages and a string of extraordinarily good luck.   These guys are by their nature unrepresentative.    There is often no useful lesson to be learned. 

I read the biography of Eisenhower a while back.  He was a moderately successful officer, but expected to retire as a colonel at best.  Then the war came.   Eisenhower and many of his classmates rose to high levels in the army.  Had they been born five years later or five years earlier few of them would have been so successful and none of them would have reached the five star ranks.    You cannot really use that information and it has no predictive value.    Nobody could plan Eisenhower’s career.   It would be more useful to study the moderately successful over a longer period.   Those are the guys who would be in a position to jump ahead IF the opportunity came.

None of us is around long enough to get what we “deserve.”  In the FS, my guess is that if you had a career spanning 200 years, you would probably end up where you belong, as random chance variations might even out.  I think the variation tends to go mostly in one direction, however.   I know some ambassadors who could have been unsuccessful if not for a single lucky break that made other breaks possible, accreting small advantages until they became big ones.     On the other hand, there on people on whom lucky breaks are wasted. 

Gladwell says that success depends on practice (he says it requires around 10,000 hours) and talks about the lucky breaks that gave various top   performers the opportunity.   This is probably true, but not everybody is willing or able to put in those long hours.  Hard work matters too.

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It is NOT Always About Politics

I like to watch the Sunday morning news programs.  My morning routine includes “This Week,” “Chris Matthews,”  “Fox News Sunday” & “Meet the Press.”   I have to switch around among them, since they overlap.   That is interesting because you often see the same “opinion makers”  being interviewed on a couple of them.    It might be easier just to get the talking points.  These shows are ABOUT politics, so I shouldn’t complain, but I think they are too much about politics.

Below is Augustus Caesar, Rome’s first Emperor.

They see everything through a political lens.   I understand that Washington is a political town and politics pervades everything, however I don’t think everything is reducible to politics alone, at least politics in the sense of the competitive game.   On “Chris Matthews” eight out of the twelve pundits thought “the right” would give President Obama the benefit of a long honeymoon.   I agree with the majority.   But I disagree with Matthews and the panel when they characterized this as simple politics.   They will have to give it because they cannot be seen to oppose him.   Matthews et al are smart people and I recall the two old sayings:  “it takes a smart person to be cynical, but a wise man to get beyond that” and “A man’s view of the world is a confession of his own character.”    

Not everybody is motivated by politics – not even politicians – and especially not ordinary people.   I have particular and strongly held political views, but between elections I want my President to succeed no matter what party and I want our Congress to work under the best possible conditions.   In between elections, I don’t want to think about politics very much.  Most people are like that except during tough political campaigns or when making a calls to talk radio or C-Span.    Being politically aware all the time is just too exhausting.

Our system makes good or at least okay decisions most of the time.  More important is our capacity to experiment and reinvent while maintaining the fundamental integrity of our structure.  The fact that we enjoy the oldest living Constitution in the world and are second oldest continuous government in the world (after the Brits) is ample evidence of our stability.   It is noteworthy that the British heritage has influenced so many stable democracies (Besides the U.S. and UK, Australian, New Zealand, Canada, among others, and arguably even India).  To a significant extent, the countries with this heritage allow their citizens more freedom FROM politics than most others.   In America, it is possible to be prosperous, secure and successful w/o strong political connections.   If you think about that for more than a minute and put it into historical context, that is truly amazing.   Freedom FROM arbitrary government action and the capriciousness of petty officials is rare in history.   We complain about our lack of freedom and opportunity, but we have (to paraphrase) the worst possible system … except for everything else.

I worry that we may ask too much from government and I get nervous each election season.   History shows that people voluntary give up freedom in return for the promise of stability and prosperity but they end up usually getting none of the above.   It is useful to read the stories of Republics, ancient and modern, as our Founding Fathers did.  This could happen to us too, but the good sense of the American people and the soundness of our institutions win out in the end.   Most of us are not really interested in letting politics intrude too much into our daily lives and private affairs – especially not “theirs” but even our own.   We get a little hysterical from time to time, but to the disappointment of radicals on all sides, moderation and good sense prevail. 

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Knowing Too Much

We found more than thirty official or authoritative studies of American public diplomacy compiled after 9/11.   This doesn’t even include the whole cottage industry producing popular speculation, magazine articles and general gnashing of teeth about “why they hate us.”    Maybe we know enough to draw conclusions.  Maybe we even know too much.   This is what I am thinking about as my group prepares to make our own contribution to this huge library. 

You have to be careful not to gather too much information.   Theoretically, the more information you have, the better decisions you could make.  Theoretically that is true.  In fact it is not. For that to be true, you would need to have near perfect recall, wonderful understanding and supernatural ability to assimilate the diverse data points.   The capacity of our computers to gather and store information leads us to a kind of hubris that we CAN use all of it.  We cannot.   And that also makes the erroneous assumption that the information is knowable. In the case of something like public diplomacy, we are dealing with conditional facts, a kind of game theory where any move we make provokes reaction which change the fundamental realities.  

 It is like one of those sci-fi movies where someone goes back into the past to correct some mistakes, right some injustice or just take advantage of his knowledge of the past to make money in the present.   It never works out because changing conditions in the past creates a different reality in the present.    This is no mere artifice.  We are doing it all the time.   Of course, we cannot change the past.  We can only make plans in the present to affect the future, but the real world principle is very similar.  Maybe that is why we like those fictional time paradoxes or the similar literature scenarios where trying to avoid the consequences of a prophecy create that outcome (e.g. Oedipus).     Our attempts to achieve a particular future alter the conditions we are studying.

Sci-fi scenarios aside, we still can be easily overwhelmed by information.    At some point, more information doesn’t improve conclusions.   In fact, it begins to create confusion.   This seems counter intuitive and people in the midst of information gathering are usually fooled.  Studies show that decision making does not improve and even gets worse, but the decision makers themselves have more confidence in themselves.   Bureaucrats also like to gather information perpetually in order to delay the moment where they have to take a risk and come to a conclusion and provide more cover if they make any mistakes.   This is a variation of the paralysis by analysis problem.  BTW – most people have the cognitive capacity to can juggle around seven chunks of information; really smart people can do maybe nine and the cognitively challenged can handle fewer, but at some point enough is enough and more is too much.

Next week we will be reading reports and talking to experts.   I believe in going through the process and that is what I am supposed to do, but we have to recognize when we are done and move along.   It will hard to let go.

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Using Time Wisely

Not many people are around here on the day after Thanksgiving.   I like to work on such days.  Volunteering for such duty makes me popular and the quiet time gives me a chance to think.  This is my most productive activity.

Below is the Commerce Building.  When it was finished in 1932 it was the largest office building in the world.

I read the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People almost twenty years ago.  It was one of the books that most influenced my life.   There is not very much really original in the book.  Stephen Covey’s contribution is that he manages to put things we know we should do into understandable chunks.  I won’t go further into detail.  Suffice it to say that it gives practical methods to live a principle centered life and puts character development above the tricks most self-help books teach you to get ahead. 

One of the parts I found most useful was the section on time management.   I am not talking about making lists and accomplishing goals.   Covey talks about doing the right things and taking control of the process.  He divides tasks on a four quadrant chart.   Some things are urgent and important.  Some are important but not urgent.   Others are urgent but not important and the last quadrant has things that are not urgent or important. 

It is easy to get stuck doing the things that are urgent, whether they are important or not.  Can you resist picking up a ringing phone, even when you are having an important talk with someone in person sitting in front of your desk?   But the urgent is often not important and the urgency of many important events results from lack of anticipation and planning.  The place where you should spend most of your time is among the tasks that are important but not urgent.  (Preventing the fire is more effective than the urgent need to put it out, but which seems more heroic?)  This will put you in charge of your life and help you avoid lurching from one urgent task to another w/o the time to do them well.  It will also help you avoid doing many “urgent” things altogether.

BTW – I am writing all this from memory.   If the details are not perfect, I don’t care.   I had a chance to meet Mr. Covey a few years ago.  He told me that the ideas were meant to be internalized and changed to fit particular circumstance and personalities.  Ideas are like virus that live & reproduce only in human hosts.  They mutate and adapt.  The ideas I was “infected” with twenty years ago are now uniquely mine.  My experience has customized them and these are the lessons I took.

Below is Dept of Agriculture building completed in 1930.

I rarely agonize about decisions.  People who like me say that is because I just know the right thing to do.  Detractors see me as shallow, flippant & insouciant.   I believe the truth is that I can make quicker decisions because I have thought through similar scenarios and tried to apply values & integrate experience and I did this BEFORE I was faced with the urgent decision currently at hand.  Contemplation is an activity that fits squarely into the important but not urgent category. That does not mean that I make the right decision, BTW, but I am neither flippant (usually) nor do I just know what to do by some mystical process.

Covey and many other leadership thinkers tell us that is what we are supposed to do, but they always warn that other people might not like it (hence the flippant moniker) and they will give us a hard time for “not doing real work.”  All of our great achievements are created twice: first and most importantly in our minds and then only later in the practical world.   The intellectual capital is usually the most valuable, but others can see only the practical creation or activity.

There is a story about a man who has a serious plumbing problem. He calls the plumber who tells him he can fix the problem and it will cost $100.  The plumber goes down and whacks one of the pipes and everything begins to move as it should.   When he asks for his $100, the customer is irate.  “All you did was whack the pipe and it took only a couple seconds,” he says.  “I want an itemized bill.”  The plumber gives him the bill which reads: whacking pipe – $.05; knowing where and how to whack pipe – $99.95.