Solar Decathlon 2011

Because the National Book Festival has top billing this weekend, the Solar Decathlon has been relegated to West Potomac Park, which is just off the Mall, near the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and not far from the new Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial.

The Solar Decathlon is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Twenty teams are competing in the 2011 event, which will open on Saturday, September 23, and run through Sunday, October 2. The team from The Ohio State University will try to improve on its top ten performance of 2009. Because of the plethora of interesting things to do on or near the Mall this weekend, Glenn Fellows could easily scratch a half-dozen activities off their checklists for the quarter. And then they can write about their experiences on the WAIP blog.

National Book Festival

The Fall 2011 class of John Glenn Fellows moved into the Congressional apartment building today, which means that the National Book Festival can't be far behind. Sponsored by the Library of Congress and now in its eleventh year, the event will take place on the National Mall next weekend, September 24-25.

One of the big attractions of the National Book Festival is the opportunity it provides to meet best-selling authors. Here is a list of featured authors.

September 19 update: See photo above of the Fall 2011 class on the stairs at the National Archives. From left to right: Zachary Druga, Alexandra Constantinou, Joseph Guenther, Gianna Domine, Blake Swineford, Abby Warner, Karlton Laster, Mitchell Moximchalk, Anthony Adornetto, Kyle Nappi. Check out their brief bios here.

Remembrance and Reflection

For the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Museum of American History has assembled an exhibition of more than 50 objects recovered from wreckage at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. These objects, which under any other circumstances would be regarded as entirely prosaic, help to convey the human dimensions of the tragedy of that day. For one week, the objects will be displayed on open tables at the Museum, which is on the Mall at Constitution Avenue and 14th Street, N.W. Dana Milbank has a piece about the exhibit in Sunday's Washington Post. In the same issue, Marc Fisher writes about the how the Pentagon attack has been completely overshadowed not only by the images of Ground Zero but even by the extended memorialization controversy. Meanwhile, Anne Applebaum considers the appalling cost of the War on Terror pursued in response to the attacks. It is my understanding that after this week the artifacts will become part of the permanent collection of the Museum, which means that the incoming class of Autumn 2011 Glenn Fellows will be able to see them under glass.

September 7 correction: I went to see the show today. It's very moving, in part because the items are spread out on tables quite informally, along with minimalist identifying labels, like the objects for sale at a church bazaar. When the show closes on September 11, they will be sent for permanent storage to New York. So it's now or never for Washingtonians.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial

Last week’s brush with Hurricane Irene caused the ceremonial dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial on the National Mall to be indefinitely postponed. That doesn’t mean that the memorial isn’t open for business, however. In fact, my colleague, Michael McCandlish, and I spent part of yesterday afternoon at the site, four acres of hallowed ground on the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. As usual, the opening of a new memorial on the Mall has been marked by controversy.

To begin with, charges of “profiteering” have issued from critics offended by the King family’s insistence that they be paid licensing fees for use of Dr. King's image.

Then there was a dust-up when it was revealed that Lei Yixin, a Chinese sculptor noted for his work on a statue of Mao Zedong, had been commissioned to use Chinese laborers to sculpt Dr. King’s likeness from an enormous piece of Chinese granite. Naturally, none of this sat well with African American artists or U.S. labor unions.

The completed composition is said to express the idea of a “stone of hope” emerging from a “mountain of despair,” the stone in this case being a colossal image of the martyred Civil Rights leader (see photo above). There are those who say the sculpture doesn’t look much like Dr. King, or that his facial expression is wrong. Others complain about its alleged “Stalinist” overtones. I’ll confess that the sculpture looks to me like a faithful rendering of Dr. King, and I would think that the National Mall might be the one place in America where bombast on a colossal scale seems right at home.

Now it turns out that Maya Angelou and others are unhappy with the inscriptions that adorn the central composition and the surrounding stone wall. Their grievance has to do mainly with a passage on the side of the central sculpture that reads “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” though without the quotation marks, because the passage was abridged and yanked out of context from one of Dr. King's speeches. Angelou says that the resulting inscription makes him sound like an “arrogant twit.” I’m not sure I see that, but I agree that it’s trivializing, which is to say not appropriate for a memorial, where dignity and sense of decorum count for a lot.

I found the memorial moving, and definitely worth the trip. It brought back memories of the man of peace and of how polarizing his message was at the time. It’s a little unsettling to reflect on the many ways that later generations manage to dishonor fallen heroes--usually unwittingly, and often by sanitizing their disturbing messages. Even the formal study of history, a noble calling too often treated as just one damn thing after another, can have the same effect.

A case in point: In the early 1990s, I was in Memphis, Tennessee, to attend a meeting of faculty members and administrators from many of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. The organizers had arranged for us to have a private tour of the newly opened National Civil Rights Museum, which was very cleverly designed to incorporate the Loraine Motel, where Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as part of the museum. As it happened, the young woman who served as our tour guide was a history graduate student, and she had memorized a script containing what seemed like an infinite number of arcane factoids and random statistics more or less bearing on the Civil Rights movement. But it was all book-learnin’, stuff suitable for cramming on the night before the final exam. For her, Martin Luther King, Jr., was nothing more than a name in a textbook.

Not so for my colleagues on the tour. Most had participated in boycotts, sit-ins, and demonstrations during their youth. Some had been arrested. Some had traveled to Washington for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They had seen Jim Crow up close, and felt his wrath. They were moved by the National Civil Rights Museum, and visibly distraught and embarrassed by the tour guide who, not having lived through the Civil Rights Era, was simply tone-deaf to its drama. As mementoes, factoids just don't cut it.

Hurriquake Week in DC

Word from the National Building Museum is that their popular exhibit, "Lego Architecture: Towering Ambition," sustained only minor damage during the earthquake. We'll see what happens this weekend with the hurricane. Then there's the tidal wave and the plague of locusts....

Turkey on the World Stage

Anyone who has ever taught for a living will understand that a large part of the appeal, and the challenge, lies in trying to package a wide range of scholarly sources in such a way as to tell a compelling story. Unfortunately, the charms of syllabus development can lead to the folly of imagining that it can ever be a completely finished product; in this way a reading list is akin to public policy. To quote Lord Salisbury: "There is no such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making."

The result is that a syllabus or a reading list can be the occasion for unanticipated intellectual excursions. Three years ago, when I began leading the WAIP policy seminar, PUBPOLM 689, it never occurred to me that modern Turkey, a remnant of the old Ottoman Empire regarded as "the sick man of Europe" prior to World War I, is a remarkably useful lens for viewing world affairs.

The seminar has evolved in such a way that Turkey intervenes at three different points in the course of the quarter. First, there is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a classic case study in crisis management and a staple of all introductory courses in public policy. The standard treatment has President Kennedy staring down Premier Khrushchev, with the Soviets finally blinking, removing their missiles, and dismantling their Cuban bases, all in exchange for our promise to leave Castro alone. It turns out that there was more to it than that. Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s Attorney General, offered discrete assurances to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin that we would take our Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, which shared a tense border with the U.S.S.R. at the time. We did so less than six months later.

Second, we read Samuel P. Huntington’s famous, or infamous, "clash of civilizations" essay, in which Turkey is treated as the epitome of a “torn” country, having been riven by competing traditions, some of them Muslim (though not Arabic), and some European (though not Christian). Turkey—the secular, Western-oriented republic created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (pictured above)—rejected Mecca, only to be rejected in turn by Brussels; at the end of the 20th century Huntington saw Turkey as "making strenuous efforts to carve out [a] new identity for itself.”

Turkey, mainly a sidebar in the history of the 20th century history, promises to feature much more prominently in the narrative of 21st-century world affairs. In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, Stephen Kinzer discusses four books that assess the profound policy initiatives being pursued by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party. Erdogan’s Turkey is a modernizing republic inclined to put the military in its place and turn its back on secularism--though not on economic growth or autocracy. Tellingly, Kinzer’s piece is entitled “Triumphant Turkey?”

Kinzer raises a number of interesting questions about Turkey's changing place on the world stage, and given the current condition of Europe, it may inspire one to ask why the Turks are so keen to join the European Union. To help bail out the Greeks, perhaps?

September 16, 2011, update: For the Washington Post, Craig Whitlock reports that the U.S. and Turkey have signed an agreement that will allow the U.S. to install a radar station that will be part of a system designed to fend off missile attacks from either Iran or Russia. Separate negotiations about predator drones continue.

A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review (reprise)

Last week the Summer 2011 class of Glenn Fellows read Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms.

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

During his posting to Cairo, Prentice is asked to interview a Sheikh who might have been in a position to influence the extremists holding a number of American hostages in Beirut. Prentice’s efforts fail. “But never mind,” seems to sum up his reaction. “I could only hope that someone—the ambassador or an unknown friend in the department—would make an excellent report of my performance for my file.” The adventure, he concludes, “just might be a turning point—upward—in my career.” On the basis of the evidence provided by the author, the judgment handed down by Prentice’s first wife seems just: He has “a pretty good soul, even though sometime it seems quite lost in the bureaucratic maze.”