#35 – Dick Bernard: President Obama speaks from Cairo

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Yesterday afternoon I made a spur of the moment visit to an administrator at a Minneapolis college.  I found his office.  Luckily he was in.  I knocked.  “Come in”, he said.  He was looking at his computer screen, watching a replay of the President Obama speech in Cairo from some hours earlier.
My visit to this college office was not to talk about Obama or the Middle East or such.  I did the business I planned to do, and departed.  We didn’t even mention the speech.  He and I have never talked politics.  I don’t know what his politics is. 
But one of my enduring memories of Obama’s speech in Cairo will definitely be walking into that office, and seeing Tom watching the President speak on his computer screen.  It will remind me of those iconic photographs of families sitting around their radio listening to President Roosevelt address the nation on some critical issue or another in the 1930s or 1940s.  Roosevelt, too, was a master of the art of communications with a distant public. 
My guess is that the scene I witnessed yesterday was repeated  in countless and varied settings here and around the world, particularly in the Muslim world.
As is predictable, every word, every facial expression, every single nuance of the Presidents long speech will be dissected, analyzed and interpreted for its meaning.   The interpreters will focus on their own particular favorite issue, whether he said the right or wrong thing about it, and then “spin” it to their particular preference.
It was an international speech, to the Muslim world in particular, and because of the miracle of technology it can be watched and re-watched over and over and over again.  What Obama said, yesterday, he knows he will be held to.  This was not a campaign speech; rather it was the leader of a powerful country speaking to the entire world. 
Personally, I think the key facets of this speech, yesterday in Cairo at about this time of day U.S. time, were its symbolic aspects:
A.  that it was specifically addressed to the Muslim world;
B.  that it was given in the Muslim world, in Cairo;
C. that it specifically acknowledged and honored the Muslim tradition and the people who are part of that major world religion;
D. that he chose specifically to publicly acknowledge the role of the United States in the overthrow of the elected government of Iran in 1953.
Yesterday, today and beyond there will be endless analysis of the Presidents speech. 
While there are endless and immense problems which no speech can pretend to solve, my own prediction is that President Obama’s speech in Cairo on June 4, 2009, is historically very significant, and can give impetus to a major shift in global relationships.  It provides a floor for new conversations; an opportunity to think in different ways.
He was speaking to world leaders, yes; but he was speaking even more to those ordinary people who in many settings throughout the Muslim world were watching his image on television and listening to his words, perhaps much like common Americans listened to Roosevelt during the Great Depression and World War II, and then went out and contributed to the necessary effort to accomplish the tasks at hand.
My hope is that all of us will use this speech as an opportunity to move forward, rather than to get mired in the “same old, same old” of focusing on what was or wasn’t said, and how precisely the administration follows through on the text, or not.  Certainly it is important to be vigilant, and to even be critical, but this speech was an entire “book”, more than simply a chapter or a few paragraphs.   
http://www.whitehouse.gov to access a video or transcript of the entire speech

#34 – Bruce Fisher, Carol Ashley: The Conversation about Climate Change

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A reader comment follows this post.
Note from Moderator: On the local evening news on June 1, the weatherman noted that May, 2009, was one of the driest on record, exceeded only by May, 1934, a year of great drought.  Is May, 2009, just an unusual month of weather, or a looming manifestation of serious climate change problems to come?  Are those concerned about climate change simply worry-warts, or are those unconcerned denying an unpleasant reality?  Do we live in the moment, or act for the long term?
In early April, I publicized a website that features a 20+ section “Crash Course” to help understand the possibilities of the future, and by understanding help deal with those possibilities.  The website is http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse for those interested.  In my opinion it’s well worth the three hours it takes to view the sections. 
Carol Ashley took the time to view the series, and commented on it in #19 on this blog, May 11, 2009.
Bruce Fisher also took the time and on May 25 posted the following, to which Carol filed her own response.
Bruce Fisher: I’ve been thinking about the “Crash Course” and the significance of its concepts for our environment and economy.  A few days ago, [an] article by George Lakoff appeared in the Huffington Post and it struck me that framing is understanding and the environment and economy need to be framed together (the [political] right has done this for years with the emphasis on the environment as material resource for the economy).  As a cognitive scientist, Lakoff knows this best.  For those who have taken the “Crash Course”, [the Lakoff commentary at http://tinyurl.com/08pwon] is an especially relevant article.  [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/why-environmental-underst_b_205477.html ]
Carol Ashley:  From Lakoff’s article “…one of the things Westen and Lake get right is in an incomprehensible diagram on the back page: an explanation of why discussions of climate fail.  It is hidden in a discussion of “associations,” an inadequate way of discussing the public’s frame-based logic.  Climate and weather are usually understood as beyond immediate causation, something you are subject to, but can’t just go out and change right away.  Climate is not directly and causally connected to the values that underlie our concerns about our planet’s future: empathy, responsibility, freedom, and our ability to thrive.  They try to say that in the diagram, but the arrows and lines don’t communicate it.”
What I see in my rural area is that people are prone to see the weather as a daily event: at the most, a weekly or seasonally based phenomena.  It’s kind of the same problem in government…no long range vision.  So people are prone not to see the effects of short term actions, not to see the actuality of broader patterns and rather base assumptions on climate on a cooler than usual spring season, for example.
Rural people and those in small towns often value community and their particular environment.  (Their community tends to be very small comprising only their extended family, church and friends.)  They don’t value getting rich.  They also don’t trust government and haven’t for years. They vote and expect who they voted for to do the work of politics.  They tend not to stay informed.  They don’t have the time and the access to information.  And their lives are often a struggle to survive.  They, therefore, don’t make policy so these observations may not apply to others, but I think some applies to just being human and there are plenty of poor people in cities who for racial reasons are also mistrustful of others and rely on their communities.
There is also an issue of “delayed gratification” here, I think.  That ability to do what needs to be done, sacrificing what one wants for what one will have in the future and even forgoing what one wants for the sake of one’s children and grandchildren.  It’s easier to do that for one’s own children than to consider the world’s children.  I think, in order for delayed gratification to be possible for an individual, one has to have some basic needs met, like food, shelter and some measure of health.  Long-term poverty undermines that.
The reason this may be important is that those on the extreme right are often rural and poor.  People in cities who live in poverty are often focused on basic needs, too, and need framing that applies to them more immediately and practically.  The difference between the rural and city poor, I think, is the very fierce independence of the rural and their valuing of that independence and the rural environment over the desire for wealth.  Either way, the best way to reach these people is through major media and through churches.  (Even then they tend to be pretty independent minded and hold to what they have always believed.)  The framing has to reach them that way.  So the first step is back to square one, in my opinion.  Get corporations out of government and create an avenue for non-profit media.  Is that even possible any more?  Like most rural people, I doubt it.  The super rich are in control and will be.  Haven’t they always been?  Even in the beginnings of our country?
I suppose my pessimism comes partly from being rural and poor.  I have little ability to be an activist.  The poor and rural always seem to be at the mercy of others.
Note from Moderator: Essays from others on this topic are solicited.  Watch future entries.

#33 – Dick Bernard: Susan Boyle goes back to her village

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A reader comment follows this post.
Saturday night, May 30, 2009, Susan Boyle’s dream ended…or did it just begin?
In blogpost #8, published April 16,2009, I wrote about the astonishing clip I saw of this lady singing on Britain’s Got Talent competition in mid-April.  “The rest of the story” of that happening is accessible there.  Here’s the performance that led to the post:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
The particular clip I reference has now been viewed over 65,000,000 times, the fifth most popular YouTube video ever.  There are people, like myself, who have watched it on numerous occasions.  I continue to watch it.
Now the dream has ended for Susan Boyle, or so goes the story.  Saturday night she came in second in the finals of the competition in England.  There will be a narrative that the clock has struck midnight on Cinderella, and she will fade into obscurity.  In our western society, which is trained from birth to revere winners and competition, Susan, while certainly not a loser, will now become an also ran, replaced by the inevitable next surprise sensation who will, for a time, capture the publics imagination.
Personally, I think that Susan really won by losing on Saturday night.  She really had nothing more to prove, and like most of us she was not accustomed to the life of celebrity into which she was thrust.
She had always wanted to perform on a big stage in front of a large audience, and she did, and she performed superbly.
For me, she will always be a winner, and I will go back to that clip of her on that English stage often, any time I need to be encouraged to keep on.
Back home she can (and I hope she will) attempt to resume a semblance of her former life, which was perhaps (as for most of us) not “exciting”, but manageable.  I hope she finds the job that she was looking for, something she likes, where she can come home to her cottage each evening.  I don’t wish for her a life on the road, as a performer.
It is said that we all deserve our fifteen minutes of fame.
Susan got far more than that, and likely far more than she expected.
Last evening, in a post-mortem of her loss in the finals, CBS evening news played a clip of the end of Susan’s dream.  They showed a young man holding a note written to him by Susan Boyle sometime in these last few weeks.  He had apparently written her, saying he liked her, and her short note said, apparently, that no one had told her they liked her before….
When it comes down to the end, this is where it’s at: we all need someone to like us, hopefully for who we are.  May we all be so blessed.
And may her Scottish village, and all villages, learn from her experience in the spotlight.  We are all parts of our own villages, but all of our villages are tied together in today’s world.  We are no longer and will never again be islands in isolation or independent from other communities.
Congratulations, Susan.
And a final note before I sign off on this “thread”: I found myself respecting Simon Cowall, and his fellow judges Piers and Amanda, as time went on.   No doubt Simon and the others are very astute business people and celebrities, but their warmth and humanity showed through in substantial bits and pieces I came across in following days and weeks.  Had I stuck with my initial sense of them, closing my book on their character after watching them judge Susan harshly when she came on stage that first evening, I would have missed another much more positive side of each of them.