It was a pleasant drive from Houston to San Antonio. I followed I-10 most of the way and could just leave it on cruise control. One thing is a little surprising. Traffic moves a little slower in Texas, at least on I-10 on when I was driving, than it does on I-95 in Virginia. You can actually cruise at something near the speed limit and not be passed too often like you were standing still. It is a more open road too. The thing I love about Virginia is the thick forests that are all along the highway. You are generally looking at trees all the way from Washington to the Carolinas. This highway in Texas has a lot more grass and open vistas. This is also beautiful, but different.
One thing you also notice in Texas are the flags. Texans love their state flag, which is prominent along most of the roads and on building tops. It is a pretty flag. Above is the headquarters of Alamo College. I like the really big live-oak. Below is the street new Alamo College HQ. The place is gentrifying. It seemed familiar. I figured out why. The area was former light industry, which reminds me of Milwaukee were I grew up, and they have a cream colored brick, also like Milwaukee.
San Antonio just seems a pleasant city. I got to my appointment at Alamo way early, so I had a chance to walk around the neighborhood. I spent about an hour. It was a little hot, but worth the walk. Below is the Mexican restaurant where I had a good meal for $8.
The road from San Antonio to Austin, I-35 was not as nice. There was traffic the whole way and along the road were strip malls and car dealers. It seemed like a continuous semi-urban corridor. The only entertainment was a woman in front of me. She was ripping something up and throwing it out the window. Then we she passed some state buildings, she gave it the finger for a long time. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and couldn’t take my eyes off traffic long enough to see. She had Oklahoma plates. Maybe she bears some grudge against Texas. I didn’t take any pictures along the actual highway because I didn’t stop, but I took the one below from near my hotel in Austin, which gives the idea.
The hotel is nice, as Courtyards always are, but I was disappointed. It is called Courtyard-Austin-Arboretum. I thought it would be within walking distance to some trees. I learned that nothing is within walking distance of much of anything around here. The “arboretum” nearby is a shopping area called that and some condos called that. Below is where I had supper. I could walk there from the hotel, although you have to be careful crossing the road. I thought Marie Callender just made frozen pies. Who knew it was a restaurant? Seems like mostly old people frequent the place. I suppose that is now my demographic too.
Community colleges are one of the great innovations in education. I wrote about them in an earlier post. While in Texas I took the opportunity to visit community colleges in Houston and San Antonio. Both are working on programs in Brazil.
Houston Community College, Jackson Community College (MI), and Red Rocks Community College (CO) are cooperating in the US-Brazil Connect consortium. They will send a group of students to Salvador, Bahia next month to tutor in English. Brazilians are expected to come to these schools in the U.S. this fall. Read more about it here. I know our Brazilian friends are enthusiastic about preparing their workforce to the needs of today and this will be well received. Meanwhile, our American community colleges can deepen their international profiles, a win/win. I told the Director of International Initiatives at HCC, that we would visit the students in Salvador, either I will do it myself or ask our colleagues in Rio to do it. It will be good to see what is happening and maybe we can be helpful. I also met the woman who will actually lead the group in Brazil.
The next day, I drove to San Antonio to visit Alamo College. I became familiar with Alamo last year when we helped a group of student from Rio Grande do Sul get visas for an exchange with Alamo.
I am always astonished by the breadth and depth of connections that Americans and Brazilians make on their own. We at the embassy and consulates try hard to make connections, but most of it happens w/o our help and much of it happens even w/o our awareness. The American nation truly is greater than the American government. But we do try to facilitate these things when we discover them and I believe we do add value. Alamo chancellor will make a trip to Brazil next month. I told him that we could help and asked that we go along on some of the visits. This is a win/win too. We help each other make connections. I also met the woman who is honchoing the connections and who has worked with Marcia in the past. You can read more about Alamo here.
The Alamo people are interested in taking part in the MEC program for English teaching. They told me that they already run an intensive course on ESL for Mexican teachers and can do a similar one for Brazilians.
My pictures are from Houston. I will add some from San Antonio tomorrow, but I want to get some sleep and don’t feel like editing today, yet I want to post this now. You can see from the pictures that Houston is a modern city, lots of glass and steel. There is still some green and many nice live oaks. The top picture is the HQ of Houston Community Colleges.
One of the simple joys of life is just walking around w/o a rush. You just have to put your feet on the ground. I had the chance to do a lot of walking and some running in the old places around Washington. Washington is one of the world’s great cities and great for running and walking. One of the things I like is that you can be by yourself but not alone. There are enough people around but you can get away from them.
They have the Mall all dug up. The signs say that they are replacing the dirt with dirt that doesn’t compact easily, so that it can handle the crowds. They are also laying some kind of drainage and water holding pipes so that it can stay green w/o lots of watering. A lot of science, technology and engineering will go into this lawn and if they do a good job nobody will notice when it is done.
IMO they did a good job on the Mall in general. You would not know to look at it, but the Mall is largely hollow, i.e. there are roads and buildings under it. They didn’t want to build up when they built new museums a couple decades ago, so they dug down.
The Mall is getting a little crowded. They built the Museum of the American Indian about ten years ago. It is a superb building and the grounds are interesting. I don’t think the museum itself is very good. IMO, it lacks a focus. They tried to accommodate too many groups. The picture above shows construction of the Museum of African Americans. I think that museums on the Mall should commemorate our common American heritage. Our motto is still “e pluribus unum,” which means “from many, one.” There is lot of room for pluralism in our country; it is what makes our country great, but there are only about 300 acres on the National Mall.
Above is the work on Gallows Road. Notice the change in grade. I wanted to take a picture before they were done. I think it will be very different later.
The trees have lots of new growth. Loblolly pines grow throughout the summer. In that, they are different from white pines and many others that throw up new growth only in the spring. But the spring time is the big growth spurt for the loblollies too. The trees on CP are now nine years old. I recall how barren it used to look with a few pine springs barely visible among the weeds. It is good to recall this, since I have five acres of newly planted longleaf, which are looking even more desolate. The picture above shows how trees have grown. Below is the new longleaf plantation. Longleaf seedlings look like clumps of grass. Of course some of the green you see in the picture really are clumps of grass or weeds. It will look good in a couple of years. Eric Goodman also planted some bald cypress in the wet areas and third generation loblolly at one end.
Below is the closeup of a longleaf seedling. We did good site preparation, with brown and burn last winter. This should give the little pines a head start.
Below is a “vernal pond”, i.e. a big mud puddle, with lots of tadpoles. Amphibians need these sorts of things. If the pond is permanent enough to have many fish, the fish eat the eggs and tadpoles. If it is too small, the pond dries out before the amphibians are through with their development. These kind of ponds are not attractive, but they are a necessary part of the web of life.
Below the hunt club planted various wildlife food and warm season grasses to encourage wildlife, especially animals like Bobwhite quail. Dominion Power, which owns the power lines, is paying us to offset the costs. It saves them the trouble and money of maintaining the cover. I have 8 acres under those lines and not using it would be a waste.
Below shows Boy Scouts clearing some paths. I guess they win merit badges for woodsmen skills. They need land to practice and I have the space.
Below shows my new sycamores. They are growing fast along the watercourses. They volunteered a couple years ago. I have been cutting out the box elders and other brush. The sycamores do well in moist soils and send down a thick network of roots that holds the banks. They are not much use from the forestry profit point of view but they are beautiful trees and they get really big. I am a little allergic to them. I cough when I cut a lot of branches. Sycamores have a very distinctive smell. I suppose there is some relation. They always remind me of the brief time I lived in Indiana, on the banks of the Wabash far away.
Being back in Washington has the advantage of being able to do intellectual things, such as attending lectures, at low of no cost. Alex & I went to two of them this week. We saw Jonah Goldberg launching his new book called the “the Tyranny of Clichés” at AEI and H.W. Brands talking about his new book, “The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr” at Smithsonian. Both were lively speakers.
Goldberg says that people use clichés as ways to shut off debate and delegitimize arguments they cannot win. He gave the example of somebody saying “violence never solved anything.” This often ends a debate. If you question the statement, it sort of implies that you support or at least accept violence. In fact, violence has solved many problems, especially violent problems. And non-violence works only against people who are already not very violent. Gandhi, for example, could be non-violent only because was facing an opponent – the British – that believed in the rule of law and was susceptible to persuasion. There may have been Gandhi type people in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union but they disappeared into concentration camps of Gulags with their voices forever silenced. Usually, potential Gandhis were silence before they even said much of anything at all. Nazis and communists were skilled at identifying and liquidating potential threats even before they were manifest.
I enjoyed the Goldberg speech, but it was more along political lines. The H.W. Brands was more intellectually interesting. He is a historian talking about history and seems to have reached some of the same sorts of conclusions I have about historiography. In fact, when I relate what I recall he said, I am a little worried that it more what I think than a real description.
Brands talked about the differences between writing novels and writing history. Novels are more compelling to some people because you can have dialogue and you can know what people are thinking. Historians almost never can do this. The problem is sources. People tend not to write down all their thoughts and even if they did, the letters or papers tend not to be preserved.
This is the big problem for biographers. Brands said that you can write about extraordinary people because people know that they should keep letters or make notes about what they say. You can sometimes write about ordinary people in extraordinary times because they know to write things down. That is why we can write history of common people during the Civil War because so many people wrote their thoughts. I thought Brands took a courageous stand when he explained why he couldn’t write biographies of women. Women, he said, tended not to have available sources.
You could write a biography of Abigail Adams from her letters to John Adams, but that would mostly be a biography of John too. In fact, that is what David McCullough did with his biography of John Adams. This brings another interesting permutation. The John & Abigail relationship is so rich for historians because they were so often apart when important things were happening. If they are together, they presumably still talk about these things but they leave no record.
Another disadvantage of history versus a novel has to do with conclusions. A novel can produce a story with clear heroes, villains, beginning and endings. History is never so tidy. Beginnings and endings flow into each other and they rarely are clear. History never ends.
I agreed with Brands’ distinction of mysteries from secrets. A secret is something you don’t know but in theory could find out. For example, the plan of attack on Pearl Harbor was a secret, but it could have been known by the U.S. A mystery is cannot be known. A mystery has to do with intentions and aspirations. Many times the person himself doesn’t really know what he wants to do before conditions become clearer. This is the case with the famous treason of Aaron Burr.
Burr went west and was accused of planning to foment a war or maybe an independent movement in the West. Brands says that there is no way to know what Burr really planned. The circumstances never came together to allow him to make his move. Brands also thinks that Burr probably did not have a firm plan in mind. He didn’t know what he was planning to do.
IMO, this is an important thing to remember in history. We all like the good stories, but there are many mysteries in history. They are not known to us now and can never be known. We like to think that all would be well if we could just have been sources, but this is not true. They are not unknown; they are unknowable.
I kept on thinking of the dilemma of history writing. Is there history w/o historians? Obviously, things happen whether or not anybody is there to write them down. But history is more than just a recording of one thing after another. That is why we acknowledge Herodotus as the “father of history.” People recorded events long before Herodotus. Herodotus’ contribution was to try to look at history through a kind of a system, to make explanations, not just record one damn thing after another. This means, however, that historians write their narrative and that their narrative is history. Brands gave the example of constellations. We recognize the big dipper, Aquarius, Scorpio etc. when we look at the night sky. But the stars that make up these constellations are in no way connected. They are thousands of light years apart. But once somebody points out the big dipper, you can never again look at the random jumble of stars w/o seeing the big dipper. We would hope that a historical narrative is more than a mere artificial imposition on a random and meaningless distribution, but clearly the intelligence of the writer imposes order. The interpretation is necessary to make it understandable, but it is not a metaphysical truth. Historical interpretations can change and they do.
In the end we didn’t talk very much about Aaron Burr. Brands joked that we could get that story out of his book. He did explain that he tried to write the book to be interesting like a novel. He was able to do this because there was a good body of letters between Burr and his daughter Theodosia. For details, we need to buy the book.
My top picture shows Brands. He looks very severe in this picture and all the pictures I have seen on his books, but he is very engaging and friendly. The picture don’t do him justice. Below is the Hirshhorn Museum. They had some kind of projection on the building. It was well done. It must be hard to project on a curved surface like that.
We had rain on and off but it was good to see Alex graduate from college. He worked hard for this and I was glad to get home to see him do it.
Chrissy and Alex above; Mariza and Espen below
Alex followed a pattern that I think will become more and more common. He started in community college in Northern Virginia and then transfered since his grades were good. I think this is a better system. Not only is it less expensive, but it allows the students to earn their way in. Community colleges have open enrollment. The students can get better. The traditional entrance makes them jump a barrier when they are 18 years old. But then they are in. I also think we should probably go in more for distance learning. College has become so expensive. Many of the classes don’t really require residence. IMO, some courses would be BETTER as distance learning. Kids could go at their own pace.
I admire Alex. He chose to go to NOVA while still working at Home Depot, studied and finished. He was particularly brave after he was attacked during his first semester at JMU. He never complained or asked for special treatment. He came through. I am really proud of him today.
I have not written much for a while. We have been unusually busy in the office. What have I been doing?
We have had visits by important people like the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. This sucks in more people and time than you might think. I remember when Secretary of State Eagleburger came to Norway back in the 1990s. This was my first SecState visit. He came with a few people. We didn’t have to spend a lot of time preparing for the visit. He knew his business and was not much interested in VIP treatment. I tried to give him some talking points. As near as I can recall his response he said, “I don’t need these things; I make them up.” Suffice to say that it is not like this anymore.
Of course Eagleburger is a special case. He is the only career FSO ever to be Secretary of State. If that is not enough reason to revere him, he was born in Milwaukee, went to school in Stevens Point and got his degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Another thing that has been taking time is writing fitness reports. I wrote my own (we write our own first page), those of my key staff and reviewed those from our consulates. Since I had experience on promotion panels, colleagues have asked me to help with theirs. I tried my best. I work with really great people and when I read their accomplishments I feel much honored to be in this group.
Writing the reports is one of the most important things I do. Good people should get what they deserve. But I really hate the software we have to use to file the reports. It is complicated and troublesome. I never met anybody who actually likes it. It is not intuitive. You spend several hours learning how to use it each April and then don’t use it for a year and have to relearn it next time. But we cannot seem to get beyond it. We used to have a simple Word document that you could fill in. It took a few minutes. But a couple years back, they started to make us use this thing called e-Performance. It transforms a few minutes of work into hours or even days of wresting with the kind of software everybody thought was obsolete in back in the 1990s.
I should not complain. I am very lucky to work in this place, at this time with these people. There is no place I would rather work. I don’t have any unfulfilled career ambitions. Promotion for me would be an honor, but it isn’t very important to me. I am not angling for any job beyond the one I have now. My goal in taking the job as PAO in Brazil was to pursue excellence. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but I just wanted to get it really right before my time was done. This time I felt that I could really devote my full attention. I always thought that if conditions were right, I could produce excellence. Conditions are excellent; me … still not so much. It is humbling to come up against the limitations.
Only about 2.5% of the population can multitask but many more think they can and even more try. This is a source of grief and even physical danger, when people talk on cellular phones while driving, for example. Lack of focused attention is diminishing the quality of our decision making as a society.
I have to do a lot of my work at home because I cannot get time to concentrate at work. Some of the “interruptions” are important. Interacting with coworkers is the essence of work in the age of the knowledge worker. I have observed and research indicates that people who insist on “working” to the exclusion of interaction with co-workers are less productive. That time at the water cooler can be an essential time to exchange information and assess capabilities.
Much, however, is dumb. People react too quickly. Instead of thinking for themselves, they send emails, call or send instant messages. Pretty soon dozens are in on a decision that should have been made by one person. The benefit of collective knowledge rarely outweighs the inefficiency of collective thinking if nobody has come up with decent questions. Beyond that, if you count up the salary time you are paying for the dozens of kibitzers, you usually find that the total cost of making a poor decision would be less than the time spent trying to make a perfect one. That assumes that the collective decision is better, which it often is not.
I am making it my business to limit these kinds of things to the small extent that I can. Edmund Burke said “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” I am adapting that saying to meetings and activities in general. “If it is not necessary to meet/consult/act, it is necessary not to meet/consult/act. We have way too many good things to do and cannot waste time on crap that seems urgent because lots of people clamoring, but is may not be important. The most important thing I can do is decide which things we are not going to do.
Sometimes this can be an easy decision. Some things are just clearly not worth doing. The only trouble here is just saying no. The harder choices involve things that are very important or very worthy but not our business, not within our skill set or beyond our control. Focus is important. Since we cannot do everything, we need to focus on those things that only we can do, that we can do better than others or things we need to do to survive. We need to reject other things. It is malpractice to get involved in too many things we cannot properly do. The most important thing around might be curing a deadly disease, but we are not qualified to act in this sphere, so it is stupid to get involved. We would add no value and probably get in the way. More is not always better.
One of the wisest human characteristics is restraint. We should not take as much as we can. Leave something on the table. We should be careful not to overextend too often. We should judge ourselves and others by what we really do, not by intentions, bold plans or promises.
There are times when our reach should exceed our grasp. People who never fail are people who haven’t tried hard enough. But we need to focus our effort on what we do well and let others carry forward the other things. I have never met a successful person or heard about a successful organization that just played it safe and staying within the comfort zone. But I have also never heard of a successful person or organization that could not decide and stick to reasonable priorities.
The media and especially the Internet allow us to gain a superficial knowledge of lots of things. We think we understand more than we do. It has also created an immediacy that makes us think we should be interested in many things. We hear exhortations that we should be committed to lots of causes. This is not true. It is beyond our capacity. In the wise words of Clint Eastwood, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”
We can be interested in lots of things, involved in some but we can commit only to a few. Remember the difference between being committed, involved and interested when you have your bacon and egg breakfast. You are interested; the chicken is involved; the pig is committed.
Most of the time we should play the role of the human, i.e. be interested. Sometimes we should play the chicken, i.e. be involved. We should avoid having our ass on the line, like the pig, unless we are really prepared.
I was talking to a group of visiting college professors today about why the academy has seemed to become more distant from society. The irony is that years ago, when universities really were places of the elite, they were better respected and integrated than they are today. What the heck happened and how can we get back to the way it was? I think some of the problem is admissions.
When I grew up in Wisconsin, we considered the university “ours”, even though nobody in our working class neighborhood had actually been to college. Our outlook was forward looking. Parents expected that their kids could go there. In those days, if you were alive and lived in Wisconsin, you had an excellent chance of getting into the flagship university in Madison and a nearly 100% chance of getting into a university somewhere in the system.
This was a good thing for me because I was pretty stupid. I was “disadvantaged,” in that I didn’t study. No decent university would let me in today, but back then they did. After a while, I learned the system, studied and did well in school and subsequently in life. I messed up many times, but America is the land of many chances. Or at least it was.
Today admissions process is crazy. It cuts people off from the university. It creates a wall that most people know they cannot jump. Even ordinary state schools require nearly perfect academic records plus all sorts of outside activities. What 18-year-old can live up to this? The ones with parents who create and mold the resume from the time they are born or maybe even before. This creates tension in the whole system, makes parents worry that their three-year-old isn’t getting the proper stimulus, encourages legions of doctors to prescribe drugs that quiet rambunctious kids & drives teachers nuts teaching to tests. And it doesn’t improve quality. How can we stop the madness?
I have a couple suggestions. We have to remove the incentives. How? The first is open admissions. This works with community colleges. Many states are expanding sensible programs where students of community colleges can get automatic admissions to four year colleges after successfully completing their associate’s degree with a 3.00 average. This lets kids earn their way into college instead of having to make the once in a lifetime jump that can determine their futures.
My other suggestion is to allow a little more random chance. Top colleges often have several times as many qualified applicants as they do places. They spend a lot of time trying to judge the “whole person” which is something they really cannot do. Edison, Einstein, Churchill and many other great individuals were indifferent students. I have a simple solution.
Universities should establish threshold requirements, i.e. qualifications. It might be things like adequate English and math ability, experience in science etc. Better universities can establish higher thresholds and specific programs would have their own. Universities could publish these requirements in advance and interested students could work to meet them. At this point, the student would not be compared to each other. They would make the cut or not on standards determined before any applications had been received. This would probably produce many more applicant than the university could accept. After that, rely on random chance; hold a lottery; do a random number; I like rock-paper-scissors. Whatever works. Make the process completely transparent. Students could be told the odds, which would give them a better chance of predicting outcomes than they have today.
Consider the advantages of my “rock-paper-scissors” solution.
1. It is very cheap. It doesn’t require big boards of experts.
2. It is simple. Kids would not need to spend hours fighting with complicated applications and assembling all sorts of portfolios.
3. Randomness eliminates bias. A roll of the dice is fair. Dice have no memory nor can they be affected by prejudices unconscious or overt. Random chance recognizes neither race, gender nor creed.
4. It will increase real diversity. The outcomes will reflect the populations from which they are chosen.
5. It will introduce new sorts of people and ideas. One of the values of diversity is that it helps groups make better ideas. Studies have shown that groups of experts do a better job if the group contains some variety, even if the variety means someone less prepared.
It is time we gave up this crazy idea of classification and abandoned the idea that we can accurately predict outcomes. A little randomness is good. We cannot avoid it anyway and should take advantage of it. It will make us all better off.
Using the tools of randomness works in lots of life’s decisions, BTW. We should always do our homework, but at some point we have all the information that we can reasonably gather. Additional gathering will not help and may actually hurt. After you have gone as far as logic and research can take you, a coin flip is as good anything else and better than wasting time on the arrogant idea that you can figure out all the angles.
I got to go to Porto Alegre to tell the Gauchos that we were going to reopen the consulate in Porto Alegre. Well, not really inform, confirm. Everybody who might care already knew. It had leaked in Washington and was becoming general knowledge. Nevertheless, confirmation was appreciated. I got to do print, radio and TV. They appreciated my enthusiasm and previous connections to Porto Alegre. Mariza being born there was a big hit.
I did the usual public affairs work besides this. The Federal university did its first CONX program. They gathered about a dozen students to talk about U.S. elections with an American expert. Universities in Santa Catarina, São Paulo, Pernambuco and Roraima also participated, presumably with similar gatherings.
I spoke with deans at the Federal University about connections with American universities. We agreed that so much is happening that it is hard to keep track. It is an embarrassment of riches. But we have to get a handle on it. It is great when professors set up cooperation or exchanges, but the key to happiness is sustainability. We need champions to get things rolling but we need institutional relationship to keep it moving.
My last stop was the law school. They are working on investment laws. I didn’t know, but they told me, that Brazil has no bilateral investment treaties. This obviously is not a crippling impediment to investment, since there is a lot of it here and American firms have been investing in Brazil for hundreds of years. But it does add to uncertainty and creates unnecessary risk. Until recently, the Brazilians were not very interested in the idea of investment agreements, but now that Brazilian firms are making big investments elsewhere, interest is growing. We (in this case the Consulate in São Paulo) will probably participate in a program on investment law in September.
In the evening I had churrasco with Elio Lee, a friend from my first time in Porto Alegre. We have both grown older, but after a little while we found that we had not changed all that much.
Porto Alegre has really improved. I was not bad before, but today it has become a truly pleasant town. The neighborhood where we once lived, moinhos de vento, was a nice place back then. Today it is positively great, with lots of nice little shops and restaurants within minutes of our old apartment. You can see our old street, Rua Santo Ignacio, and a nice beer restaurant in the pictures. We could have bought the condominium apartment for around $60,000 back then. Today it would cost millions. We missed that boat. Of course, back then we didn’t have money to invest anyway.
