We have been admonished to make sure our public diplomacy products appeal to a broad gender audience (i.e. also are relevant to women), for as long as I have been in the public diplomacy business. Our plans always include a section about reaching out to women, as they should. But our stuff appeals less to another key demographic – boys and young men.
If you consider who does what to whom, young men are certainly the key. But the more “inclusive” we make the material, the less it is likely to appeal to young men. This is not only a gender issue. It impacts anything where people are different and that means that it impacts everything we do.
I was thinking about this during a presentation on video games and persuasion. The most popular games – and this cuts right across cultural divides – involve something blowing up. The only things that come close are car races and sports, and even in these games something often tends to blow up or at least give that sort of visual impression. Somebody asked if the games could emphasize peaceful cooperation and inclusiveness. You could do that, but then the game would appeal to a different demographic. The general rule seems to be if a mixed gender group of bureaucrats likes it, young men won’t.
All good marketing features segmentation, since no product appeals to everyone equally. The more something is loved by one group, the more it will probably be disliked by others. This statement approaches a tautology. As you specialize and tailor to a particular set of needs or preferences you by necessity remove or modify the traits that appeal to other needs and preferences. That is why a product that appeals to very large and diverse groups is usually bland. It can survive and prosper as long as there are no easily obtained alternatives, but given different choices people will make … different choices.
Public diplomacy does a poor job of segmentation. In fact, there is a significant disincentive to segmentation. We are asked to be inclusive. We often get the question, “Sure, this appeals to people in this particular group/region/circumstance/age/gender/income but how does it address the needs of that particular group/region/circumstance/age/gender/income.” The proper answer is “It doesn’t.” The things I mentioned above are ways to segment a market. You cannot design a product for everybody. Let me modify that. You cannot design a SUCCESSFUL product for everybody.
If I could point to one impediment that causes us the most problem in public diplomacy, I would say that it is the lack of ability to differentiate our products to appeal to different market segments. We often got around it in a de-facto way at overseas posts, but it is not a new problem and since it has persisted for at least a quarter century, through a wide variety of different challenges and political masters, I have to conclude that the problem is systemic. It is just very hard to be against something that is inclusive, fair, and comprehensive with a world-wide appeal. The trouble is that no such thing exists and the search for this chimera not only distracts but actually impedes development of appeals and products that appeal to discrete segments of the audience.
You just cannot have a club worth being a if anyone can join.
I went down to the farm to check for flood damage. The farm got more than five inches of rain in a couple days, which is about double the usual monthly average for November. Larry Walker told me that the road flooded and the Meherrin River was seven feet above flood stage.
The water was lower by the time I got there, although the creeks are clearly higher than usual. The forest near the river was still flooded but this is not uncommon even in more “normal” wet weather. There was no serious damage, however. It doesn’t hurt the trees if the water doesn’t stand too long and the sediment deposits are good soil builders. That is why forestry is so good for watershed protection. Judging from the sediment deposits, the water spread at least 100 yards from Genito Creek and up the road. My guess is that it must have been at least eight feet higher than usual. I have never seen it do that.
It was lucky that I went down. I got a last look at the fall colors (see above) & I fixed my bald cypress. The flooding had undercut it. I am very fond of that tree and it is the only one I have on the farm. I built up the base with rocks and put in some dirt. That should hold it. Maybe it will be better rooted by the next time we get such a big flood.
I also had the chance to meet with Larry Walker’s boss to talk about thinning schedules. He is going to take a look at the Freeman place to see if it makes sense to thin the 86 acres of 1996 pine this year. It is an exceptionally good stand of trees. I think that early thinning might be a good idea, even if the pulp prices are low. Some of the inside trees are already dying back. You have to balance the benefits with the risks. Ice storms become a danger the years after thinning, but that will be a problem no matter when you do it.
Above & below is the CP forest from 623 today and three years ago. The trees did well this year. Notice the cedar tree more or less in the middle. It stands out in the field in the top picture, You have to look hard in the bottom one, as the pines are now almost as big or bigger. In fact, you can hardly see the pines at all in the top picture. Of course, seasons are different.
You can just about live off potatoes. I mostly did that during my years in graduate school. A baked potato topped with a little butter and green beans or sauerkraut is a good meal and really requires nothing else. Potatoes have an unjustly bad reputation.
They got a bad rep from the Irish Potato famine (the monuments above commemorate the refugees who fled Potato Famine and became fine citizens of Massachusetts) but more recently they have been attacked for being a high carbohydrate, high calories food. A potato has no more calories than an apple of around the same size (potatoes tend to be bigger). The calories come from all the crap we pile on them; it’s the butter, bacon bits, sour cream, cheese and all the other things that add that fat and calories.
Despite their ubiquity central and northern European diets, Potatoes are a native American food. It took a long time to get Europeans to eat them. Like most “ancient traditions” it is not really very old. Many people thought they were poison. The green tubers and sprout are indeed poisonous. Potatoes and tomatoes are members of the nightshade family and most of the siblings are as dangerous as the ominous family name implies. But the bigger reason was just habit. Potatoes are strange. They are not like other root crops such as carrots or turnips. In fact, they are a lot more like an apple. The French even call them pomme de terre or ground apples.
The French Revolution and the generation of violence it provoked across Europe was the catalyst that thrust potatoes firmly into European cuisine. The edible part of the potato plant grows below ground and so is less at risk when marauding armies trample or burn the crops. Of course, potatoes were not as good back then. The potatoes most of us love were developed by Luther Burbank in 1872. Like the corn & tomatoes, potatoes as we know them are largely a man-made modern creation.
I still eat baked potatoes seasonally. There are a couple of reasons for this. First is that potatoes are available and cheap in the fall. You can get a ten pound bag of potatoes for a few dollars in November or December. That is why I ate them as a poor graduate student. (You can get a week’s worth of meals for around $10 even at today’s prices.) Beyond that, I don’t like to bake during the warm weather months, but it is nice to let the oven warm up the house when the weather turns cold. I learned to be a cheapskate long ago and I see no reason to change now, especially when my potato habits make sense and potatoes are so good.
Anyway, potatoes are easy to cook, cheap and basically good for you when you add some vegetables and not too much butter or sour cream. I suppose that is the reason why they are an integral part of a hardy meal.
We spent our last day in Arizona at the Bryce Thompson arboretum, where you can see trees and plants native to the desert southwest, the Sonora and Chihuahua regions, as well as those from deserts in South America, Africa and Australia.
Desert landscapes are strange for someone who grew up in Eastern North America, although the Sonora vegetation is vicariously familiar because of all the cowboy movies. Almost everything has thick skin and thorns and takes a long time to grow.
The exception is the gum tree or eucalyptus. It is a type of miracle tree from Australia. It can grow very fast in dry harsh conditions. This wonderful capacity for growth and adaption has made eucalyptus an invasive species. It can often out-compete the native desert flora, but it provides little for wildlife to eat.
Kuala bears eat the leaves, but most other animal avoid them. I suppose this is because they smell like Halls Mentholypus cough drops and probably taste like them too. It is an acquired taste. Like everything else, its value can be judged only in context. Eucalyptus are great trees to provide shade, cover and erosion control. They get big. The one pictured below was planted in 1926. And they are attractive individually and in clumps.
Date palms were familiar from Iraq. Dates are a very productive desert tree. I have written about them before. I cannot tell them apart, but I understand that there are dozens of varieties.
An arboretum is not only a pretty place. It is also a place to learn about natural communities. They say the desert speaks, but I like to have someone put up a few signs to interpret it for me. The biggest surprise was an Australian she-oak. It is not related to our oaks (quercus). I had absolutely no idea what it was. Below are Maleah, Diane & Christiana in the date palm grove.
My mother was born on this day in 1923. I never got to know my mother after I was an adult. She died when I was seventeen. So my memories are seen through the eyes of a child or at best a teenager. The one thing that I remember very clearly was that I was always sure that she loved me. Everything else is less important after that and I know that she shaped a lot of my character.
Our house was the center of family activity while my mother was there. She had three sisters (Mabel, Florence & Lorraine) and two brothers (Harold & Hermann) and we had much of the extended family, minus Harold, who I don’t remember ever meeting. The family didn’t get along with his wife, Sophie. I don’t know why. All the other aunts and cousins would come over to play cards. Usually the cousin would come too, so while I had only one sister, I feel like I had lots of siblings. I really don’t know what card games they played. I just recall the constant chatter of a kind of mixed German-English. “What’s spielt is spielt” and “now who’s the high hund?”
As I wrote above, I didn’t get to know my mother as much as I would have liked to and I am astonished at how much I don’t remember or maybe never knew. Kids are rarely interested in their parents’ life stories until they get older, maybe because they just cannot believe their parents were ever young enough to have anything to say. Besides, kids in my generation spent most of their time outside and away from the house. Parents and children have much more intense relationships these days, if for no other reason than that they are together when parents drive the kids everywhere and arrange various teams, trainings and activities. We didn’t have a car and we didn’t belong to any organized activities. I spent most of my days hanging around outside with my friends who lived nearby and I didn’t ask much. I know she was born Virginia Johanna Haase (Mariza has her middle name). Her father was Emil and her mother was Anna (Grosskreutz). She grew up on the South Side of Milwaukee and married my father after the war. Of her childhood, I know little. Her father was an engineer who remained employed throughout the Great Depression, which was evidently a rare achievement. She was an unenthusiastic student in HS and dropped out in the tenth grade, but she always encouraged education for my sister and me. She worked at Allen Bradley during WWII but not long enough to get Social Security benefits. After she married my father, she no longer did any paying work, besides occasionally free-lance catering with her sisters. My mother made really good German potato salad, which was always in demand at family gatherings.
Ma
Ma was phenomenally good natured and I remember her always being cheerful. My father told me that he was lucky to get my mother to marry him, since she was extremely popular because of her open personality. She later became a woman of substance, as you can see in the bottom picture. My father was fond of big women, so I guess they had a good thing going.
My father enjoyed beer, but Ma drank only a little. She had one bottle of Gordon’s Gin in the downstairs refrigerator. She had a drink at Christmas and that bottle was down there as long as I remember, only gradually emptying. It was still half full when she died.
Sad to say that my most vivid memories are from the end of my mother’s life. I was riding my bike up to the Kettle Moraine State forest when my mother went into the hospital for the last time. It was a big trip that I had planned for some time. My parents kept my mother’s urgent condition from me so as not to ruin it. When I called from the pay phone at the lake, my father told me that ma was sleeping. I thought that was odd, but didn’t think that much about it. When I got home she had gone to the hospital. I never saw her again.
We talked on the phone, but my mother didn’t want us to visit her in the hospital during the last days. I feel a little guilty about that, but it was a good decision. She wanted us to remember her from better times and I do indeed remember her healthy and happy instead of what I imagine it must have been after the chemotherapy and ravages of cancer.
My father got a call from the hospital about dawn on the day before she died. I heard him talking on the phone and inferred what was happening, but didn’t come out of my room when he went to the hospital. We didn’t handle the whole thing very well, but in retrospect I am not sure how it would have worked out any better if we did things differently. I lived in dread the whole day, but she didn’t die that day. I know it is illogical but I convinced myself that she would be out of the woods if she only survived the day.
But miracle recoveries happen only on television & in the movies.
They cut down the last of the big elm trees soon after Ma died. I thought it was symbolic and I paid special attention. She loved those trees and felt bad as they succumbed, one-by-one, to the Dutch elm disease. The tree by the alley was the last survivor near the house, and Ma was happy to have at least one left. It was in its yellow fall colors as I watched it fall to the ground. It was a pleasant fall day with wispy clouds.
I don’t want to end on this sorrowful note because that is not the end of the story. Among many other things, my mother left me a special legacy. Ma followed my various interests and encouraged them. All I needed to do was mention an interest in something, and soon a book appeared about it.
I have to thank my mother for all the books on dinosaurs, ecology and history. Even more important, she gave me the gift of reading itself. A well organized or impressive child I was not, but my mother had confidence in me anyway in a way that only a loving mother can. My first grade teacher put me into the slow reading group and I lived up to the low expectations. My mother complained to the school, essentially arguing that I was not as dumb as I seemed and my problem was not that the reading challenge was too great, but that it was not great enough to hold my interest. She convinced my teacher to put me into a higher reading group. Although I couldn’t meet the lower standards, I could exceed the higher ones with Ma’s help. This kind of paradox is not uncommon. I wonder how many kids w/o mothers as good as mine were/are trapped by the gentle cruelty of low expectations. Ma saved me from all that. She just expected me to succeed. I did, by my standards at least.
Thanks Ma. I wish you could have met the grandchildren. They would have loved you.
Most of the fathers in my neighborhood were veterans of World War II or Korea. I remember them mostly as middle aged guys with short haircuts, strong forearms and thick necks. They were like everybody else in our working-class neighborhood because they were the neighborhood.
Non-veterans were rare. We kids just assumed we would go into the military when we reached manhood. But I grew up just at a turning point. They stopped drafting young men the year before I turned 18. The new volunteer military meant that fewer and fewer Americans had any experience with the military. Many young people today don’t have any close friends or relatives with military experience. They take their impressions from Hollywood, which exhibits a systemic negative bias toward the military these days.
That is too bad. Today’s military is extraordinarily impressive, but many of those who haven’t seen it up close lately are stuck in the old stereotypes. You hear the prejudice when people say that the military is full of poor people w/o other choices. In fact, the opposite is true. 75% of today’s young people are not qualified for military service because they are too fat, too weak, druggies, crooks or dropouts and studies show that the average soldiers or Marines are better in terms of education, health and general attitude than the average civilian Americans of their age.
Until not long ago when I thought of veterans, I still saw those old WWII guys I knew as a kid. There service was twenty years in the past by the time I knew them. It was distant, almost legendary. Their sacrifices and those of their comrades were equally remote. The Vietnam vets were only a little older than I was, but that war got compartmentalized, with student protesters and hippies taking the starring roles leaving the military as supporting characters, portrayed as victims, villains or psychos. (BTW – I think that is one reason why movies like “The Men Who Stare at Goats” or “Brothers” infuriate me so much. I fear that Hollywood is doing to the heroes of Iraq and Afghanistan what they did to those of Vietnam.) In both cases, they were isolated from my reality.
But on this Veterans’ Day I realize that my views of veterans have undergone a significant change. It is not only because of my Iraq experience. Some of it is generational. I am now older than most veterans and many of the older veterans are nearly my contemporaries. I am now seeing veterans not as fathers, but as sons. That has made it more poignant and I have seen it closer.
The death that affected me most was that of PFC Aaron Ward. He was only nineteen and had been in Iraq less than two months when he was shot and killed on May 6, 2008 as he stretched his legs outside his vehicle in Hit (that is the city name). I knew the place but I didn’t know him or anything about him until I attended the memorial service. His friends described him as a friendly guy who liked to lift weights and joke with friends. Like everyone in Iraq, he was a volunteer who had chosen to serve his country knowing that he would be deployed to a war zone. He seems a great guy and at the same time an average guy who did the things nineteen year old guys do. I thought of Espen and Alex and I thought of Ward’s parents. And so this Veteran’s Day and every Veterans Day until the day I die I will pause to remember Aaron Ward.
Brave men and women put their own lives on hold and their own lives at risk to protect ours. We mourn the fallen, but we should think of our military as heroes, not victims. Most come back healthy and alive. They bring with them the skills, discipline, maturity and experience from their service to our country defending our freedom. They serve in the military for some years. Then they serve as good citizens for the rest of their lives. Like those veterans I remember from my Milwaukee childhood, first they defend the country and then they come back to build it and keep it healthy. They deserves the honor and respect we give them on Veterans’ Day and every day.
We finally got down to Winslow, Az. Winslow is world famous among fans of the 1970s pop group “The Eagles,” since one of their hits “Take it Easy” features a hitchhiking vignette when the singer is “…standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.” We didn’t actually see the corner, although I looked for it and evidently drove past it on the way to Highway 87.
Burning Brush
The geography changed as we climbed from the semi-arid grasslands through juniper and back up to beautiful ponderosa pine forests. I regret that it was getting a little late and we were losing the light so I couldn’t tarry longer. This is part of the Coconino National Forest and the Forest Service was busy burning the brush. We saw a lot of smoke and even some flames. You can see the smoke in the distance in the picture above. I am encouraged to see the proactive use of fire to restore the landscapes. The park-like ponderosa forest, with its interspersed meadows, is one of nature’s most beautiful communities. Below is a well-managed ponderosa forest. The ones with the red bark are at least 100 years old. Younger ones have black bark.
Cool Air and Cooler Sunsets
Although Arizona was experiencing a heat wave, and temperatures in Phoenix were reaching into the nineties, the air in the piney woods was cool. The thermometer in the car registered 59. You might think you were driving through upper Michigan. As I wrote above, we were losing the light and I didn’t want to drive the narrow, curvy roads in the dark, so we cut sideways to catch I-17. We saw one of the most beautiful sunsets I have seen with red clouds turning purple before going dark. I think the smoke from the prescribed fires contributed to the color. I didn’t even bother trying to get a picture. Beautiful sunset pictures are cliché. Part of the beauty of a sunset lies in its ethereal & ephemeral elements. Taking a picture is like trying to grab a handful of air.
The picture above is taken near a gas station in Happy Jack, AZ. Interesting name for a town. We didn’t see the actual town.
We lost altitude as we approached I-17 and the temperature rose to 81 degrees, in spite of the coming of evening. It was 86 by the time we got to Phoenix. Back in the desert. It is interesting that you can get such changes in such a short time and distance.
They had a nice restaurant with very friendly staff and an old fashioned ambiance. I had Navajo stew, which tasted a lot like traditional beef stew. It came with fry bread, which is excellent, and the portions were generous. Chrissy just had the cheese burger and fries. Usually I help Chrissy finish her lunch. This time I failed. The fry bread is very filling.
That fry bread is really good. I enjoyed it just by itself and I tried a little with butter and honey. Then I got the great idea that it might be even better if it had some tomato sauce, melted cheese and maybe some sausages and mushrooms. Maybe I should check to see if anybody else has had a similar idea before I open my restaurant.
Space & the Eternity Highway
There is a lot of space out here. Chrissy joked about those signs you sometimes see on developments, “If you lived here, you would be home already.” These roads are near nothing. We saw a few lonely cows and horses, but not much else. Sometimes I wondered if we were really moving. Although we were going 65, the horizon didn’t seem to change. This is the kind of landscape featured on SciFi. The aliens could abduct you out here and nobody would see.
Proper Picture Protocols
We stopped at the Hopi Museum. I cannot show you pictures from the actual museum. (The best I can do is the cool looking gas station above, which I assume is culturally appropriate.) A sign at the museum admonished visitors not even to take notes. The $3 you pay for admission only goes for you. Other signs warned that you would have your camera confiscated if you took pictures of various villages or activities. So I don’t have pictures of the Hopi stuff. I have some Painted Desert pictures below. There was nobody out there or much sign of life in general.
I have a good memory and could probably tell you about the things I read and saw at the museum, but they seemed unenthusiastic about this sort of sharing, so better not. Suffice to say that there were some excellent black and white photos from around a century ago of people and places as well as a display of Kachina dolls with narratives complaining about Kachina doll knockoffs and/or imitations based on the concept.
There was also a lot of information about a boundary dispute between the Hopi and the much larger and faster growing Navajo Nation. As per instructions, I didn’t take notes, but seems that things were not going well. The Navajos and Apache arrived in the area a few hundred years ago and this is only the latest round. According to the last census, there are almost 300,000 Navajos and fewer than 7,000 Hopi. The numbers explain a lot.
I framed an excellent picture in my mind. Outside the museum there were a bunch of guys selling things like firewood, rugs and Kachina dolls from little stands or the backs of pickup trucks. In the background were spaced pinon pine trees. Very picturesque. But business didn’t seem too good and I was intimidated by the picture prohibition. I didn’t know if I could take a picture or not, but why chance it? You can find out all you need to know from “National Geographic” and they have better photographers who know the proper picture protocols. I hope I didn’t anger the Kachinas.
Above is the hotel were we stayed. The El Tovar lodge has that rustic elegance characteristic of the early 20th Century. It was built in 1905, financed by the Santa Fe railroad as a sort of rail destination. President Theodore Roosevelt took the first steps to preserve the canyon about that time and the lodges here reflect that muscular personality of Roosevelt and America of that era. The Canyon was declared a national monument in 1908 and a national park in 1919.
The dark log walls are studded with actual heads of moose, deer, mountain goats and even bison. I always wanted a moose head for my wall, but I have never had enough walls to handle something as big as a moose head. You need a really big room with really high walls. Actually, you probably need something a lot like the room in a big lodge. Moose are not native to Arizona, BTW, so the head came from somewhere else.
George Clooney is charming; Kevin Spacey is villainous and Jeff Bridges is funny. But don’t go to “Men Who Stare at Goats”. You saw all the funny parts already if you saw more than one commercial for the film, so let me spoil the ending. The “good guys” put LSD into the water and chow of American troops in Iraq and release a bunch of terrorists from jail to the happy sounds of 1960s style music. Then the two main characters steal a helicopter and fly off.
At the cinema, they also featured the trailer for another movie to avoid. It featured Natalie Portman as the wife of a soldier who disappears in Afghanistan. She proceeds to sleep with his brother. The guy is found alive and comes back home and goes crazy. It seems to me to be part of the usual crazy veteran movie. Don’t go.
So far, Hollywood has produced a steady stream of bad movies related to Iraq and Afghanistan. They don’t make money, but they keep on making them. “Men Who Stare at Goats” is a kind of stealth trashing. You might not recognize it as such from the trailers or the television commercials. I liked all the actors. The idea of the movie is interesting and amusing. They could have just made a funny movie, but they chose to go with the tired old political crap. It sucks. Don’t go.
