Do away with dumb diplomacy

Apr. 29, 2014





A book street vendor passes the time on her smartphone as she waits for customers in Havana, Cuba. The Obama administration secretly financed a social network in Cuba to stir political unrest and undermine the country's communist government, according to an Associated Press investigation. / AP file photo


Written by
Lionel Beehner


I had to laugh when I heard about the U.S. Agency for International Development's botched effort to create a Twitter-like platform for Cuba intended to undermine the communist regime. Even the name -- ZunZuneo -- to the State Department's credit, sounded like something cooked up in Silicon Valley, not Foggy Bottom.

But it sparks the question: Why are we dumping millions of taxpayer dollars on such dumb programs in the first place?

To be sure, there is a need for outside-of-the-box thinking when it comes to diplomacy, which has always involved overt and covert tactics. And, as anybody who has seen the movie Argo knows, not all hare-brained schemes fail.

But our dependence on covert forms of public diplomacy can feel like an admission that our normal diplomacy has failed (see the past five decades of U.S.-Cuban relations).

It also implies we can do diplomacy on the cheap and painless. There is this dogma within the U.S. government that throwing a few million dollars at social media programs can topple nasty regimes -- just look at Tunisia or Egypt.

That the new undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, Richard Stengel, was the managing editor of Time when the magazine declared its 2006 Person of the Year was "You" -- implying the tweeting masses -- does not bode well for reform.
 
Cultural warriors

"The State Department's fascination with social media reflects a view that its job is to speak over the heads of governments, or under their heads, or something," as Laurence Pope, a former ambassador, put it in a recent interview. "That is a dangerous illusion."

Sure, spending millions on programs aimed at winning hearts and minds is better than, say, invading a country. And there is obvious value in squashing news stories -- say, an American pastor burning Qurans -- before they spread virally.

ut we can do better when it comes to selling our values and promoting democracy abroad.

During the Cold War, such information campaigns were an embedded part of our national security apparatus. Voice of America reached more than 94 million people during its heyday. We sent jazz impresarios like Duke Ellington to Eastern bloc countries to showcase American culture.

But such kinds of diplomacy got downgraded after the Berlin Wall fell. When democracy promotion came back into vogue after 9/11, we saw a string of failed propaganda efforts to win over the Arab world.

My first freelance job out of graduate school in 2002 was to write copy for Hi!! magazine, a U.S. government-funded glossy magazine in Arabic meant to portray us in a positive light to the Muslim world. The trouble is I was told not to write about religion, sex or politics, which left me writing puff pieces. No wonder the magazine folded a few years later.

We also set up Alhurra, a pro-U.S. network alternative to Al Jazeera. But the channel's legitimacy took a hit after refusing to interview anyone, including members of Hezbollah, whose views Washington found offensive.

Hip-hop diplomacy
Or consider our use of "hip-hop diplomacy," whereby Washington dispatches hip-hop artists to talk up American inclusiveness to disaffected Muslim youths as a way to prevent future 9/11s. But our cultural diplomacy only ticked off our European allies, who felt we were downplaying the musical genre's role in stoking radical Islam, and sparked a backlash within the hip-hop community itself, according to Columbia University's Hisham Aidi.

With a new kind of Cold War with Russia, there are renewed calls for revitalizing public diplomacy. One ambassador, Brian Carlson, proposed grants for Ukrainians to study politics here and call them "Putin Scholarships." Instead the U.S. government has busied itself with online trolling and tweeting Buzzfeed-like listicles such as "President Putin's Fiction: 10 False Claims about Ukraine."

It's not that we should do away with public diplomacy or even that we should do away with covert public diplomacy, but rather we should do away with dumb public diplomacy, especially one enraptured by the magic of tweeting ambassadors and other quick technological fixes.

If we couldn't dislodge the Castro regime after 50 years, how will we dislodge it in 140 characters or less?

Lionel Beehner, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.


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Crime blotter has a regular: Yankees caps

'It's a shame ... It makes us Yankees fans look like criminals'

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Yankees caps seem to turn up on suspects and in police sketches more often than those from other teams.

By Manny Fernandez

updated 9/16/2010 3:45:59 AM ET
Two men and a woman broke into a locker at a Manhattan gym in February and stole credit cards, the first in a series of similar thefts.

Three months later, in May, a young man tried to rob a Chase bank in the Bronx armed with only a note, which he slipped to a teller. She read it and stepped away, and he fled empty-handed. Weeks later, in June, a gunman robbed a Family Dollar store in Queens.

Gym-locker heists, bank robberies, daylight holdups — these New York City crimes have only one thing in common, and it is not the culprits.

A curious phenomenon has emerged at the intersection of fashion, sports and crime: dozens of men and women who have robbed, beaten, stabbed and shot at their fellow New Yorkers have done so while wearing Yankees caps or clothing.

One of the three suspects in the gym break-ins wore a blue Yankees cap. A security camera photographed the man who tried to rob the Bronx bank, and though his face was largely obscured, his Yankees hat was clearly visible. The Queens robbery suspect was last seen with a Yankees cap on his head.

Gangsta rap link?
In some ways, it is not surprising that Yankees attire is worn by both those who abide by the law and those who break it. The Yankees are one of the most famous franchises in sports, and their merchandise is widely available and hugely popular.

But Yankees caps and clothing have dominated the crime blotter for so long, in so many parts of the city and in so many types of offenses, that it defies an easy explanation. Criminologists, sports marketing analysts, consumer psychologists and Yankees fans have developed their own theories, with some attributing the trend to the popularity of the caps among gangsta rappers and others wondering whether criminals are identifying with the team’s aura of money, power and success.

Since 2000, more than 100 people who have been suspects or persons of interest in connection with serious crimes in New York City wore Yankees apparel at the time of the crimes or at the time of their arrest or arraignment. The tally is based on a review of New York Police Department news releases, surveillance video and images of robberies and other crimes, as well as police sketches and newspaper articles that described suspects’ clothing. No other sports team comes close.

The Mets, forever in the shadow of their Bronx rivals, are perhaps grateful to be losing this one: only about a dozen people in the same review were found to be wearing Mets gear.

“It’s a shame,” said Chuck Frantz, 57, the president of the 430-member Lehigh Valley Yankee Fan Club in Pennsylvania. “It makes us Yankees fans look like criminals, because of a few unfortunate people who probably don’t know the first thing about the Yankees.”

The Yankees organization declined to comment for this article.

Antisocial behavior has no dress code; people wear what they please when they please, whether they are going to see a movie or going to rob a bank. And in New York City, that often means Yankees attire, regardless of the hour or the season.

In April 2008, on the day after the Boston Red Sox defeated the Yankees in the Bronx, a man in a Yankees cap robbed a bank about a mile from Yankee Stadium. The woman who robbed a Manhattan bank on July 7 was diplomatic in her clothing choices: she wore an orange Mets cap and a gray Yankees T-shirt.

Three gunmen burst into an apartment in Washington Heights on July 23, bound the hands and feet of the tenants and left with cash. A surveillance video released by the police and broadcast on television showed one of the suspects in a Yankees cap — one of the most iconic brands in sports represented, however briefly, by someone accused of helping tie up a 9-year-old girl.

In 2007, after activists protested the sale of Yankees caps that bore the colors and symbols associated with three gangs, Major League Baseball’s official cap manufacturer pulled the headwear, and the Yankees said in a statement that they were unaware of the caps’ symbolism.

Yankees caps have even played a central role in a few crimes. One day in 2003, a fight over a missing Yankees cap broke out between two brothers in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. One brother, an ex-convict, ended up stabbing and killing the other.

One criminologist said the trend might be a result of what could be called the Jay-Z effect.

The rapper Jay-Z has worn a Yankees cap for years — on his album covers and in his videos — and has helped turn the cap into a ubiquitous fashion accessory for urban youths (“I made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can,” he boasts in one song).

'Street rep'
Criminals might be wearing Yankees merchandise not because they are fans of the team, but because they are fans of the cocked-hat look popularized by Jay-Z and other rappers, said the criminologist, Frankie Y. Bailey, an associate professor at the University at Albany, who is writing a book about the role of clothing and style in criminal cases.

“He wears it and makes it look cool,” Ms. Bailey said of Jay-Z and the cap. “It’s almost like the Yankees have acquired a kind of street rep, a coolness.”

It is but one of several theories. Sports marketing analysts say it is a matter of numbers: the Yankees sell more merchandise than any other baseball team. As of August, they hold a 25.13 percent market share of nationwide sales of merchandise licensed by Major League Baseball, with the Red Sox second at 7.96 percent and the Mets seventh at 5.32 percent, according to SportsOneSource, a firm that tracks the sporting goods industry.

For criminals outside New York, the team’s caps and clothing are nearly as popular.

The man who robbed a Chase branch in a Chicago suburb in May wore a Yankees cap. In July, a young man in a Yankees cap assaulted an 81-year-old woman in her home, about 2,800 miles from Yankee Stadium, in Seattle.

“Why people pick the Yankees over the Mariners, I don’t know,” said Detective Mark Jamieson, a Seattle police spokesman. “It just happened to be an article of clothing he was wearing on that particular day.”

And Yankees caps hold a distinguished place in the annals of crime: the man who robbed more banks than anyone else in American history wore one. Edwin Chambers Dodson, known as the Yankee Bandit because he wore a Yankees cap and sunglasses during most of his holdups, robbed 72 banks in Southern California in the early 1980s and the late 1990s.

Mr. Dodson, who died in 2003, was a fan of the team. “We did everything we could to get this guy,” said William J. Rehder, 69, a retired special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was the longtime coordinator of bank robbery investigations in the Los Angeles area.

Mr. Rehder not only named the Yankee Bandit, but helped put him behind bars twice. “I couldn’t figure out why he was so lucky,” he said. “I didn’t attribute anything to the cap, but I’m sure he did.”

Mr. Rehder, now a security consultant in Los Angeles, is a Dodgers fan. Nevertheless, he keeps an old, worn Yankees cap on a shelf in his office at home. Mr. Rehder never wears it. It belonged to the Yankee Bandit.

This story, " Crime Blotter Has a Regular: Yankees Caps," originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright © 2010 The New York Times
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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39206923/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/?GT1=43001
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Kanye West's 'Power' Video: Artists Break It Down

Aug 6 2010 6:44 PM EDT

MTV News caught up with art students, who say director Marco Brambilla is 'pushing the envelope.'
By Rochell Thomas


Ram-horned guards, floating nymphs, knife-wielding attackers, water flowing upward — huh?!?

If you can't make heads or tails out of the groundbreaking "video montage" Kanye West and artist Marco Brambilla produced for West's "Power," relax. You're not alone.

After the clip's Thursday premiere on MTV, Kanye tweeted: "It's not a video ... It's a moving painting!" During his recent talks with MTV News, Brambilla described the 90-second piece, which is made of 24 layers of video, as a "visual ballet." Others have called it a "living portrait."

A visual ballet painting? Yeah, that wasn't good enough for us either. So we consulted people who have devoted their lives to studying, analyzing and producing art, and they're confused too.

"What stood out to me was his ridiculous big chain. I don't know what that was all about," photographer Gianna Leofalcon said about the six-figure, gold medallion that depicts one of the oldest Egyptian deities, Horus.

"If that [chain] was real, he wouldn't be standing up," joked painter and illustrator Misha T.

"It symbolizes power," said graphic artist and rapper Wordspit. "Back in the day, [Egyptians] used to wear nothing but gold jewelry, and that was a sense of power with them. I feel like it symbolizes that."

Fellow graphic artist Suede Jury agreed: "The chain is larger than life. Everything about the video is larger than life."

"Yo, this dude, Marco. He's bananas, son," said painter Ibrahim Baaith. "And what's cool is that he's shooting all this and incorporating it into, like, a painting. He's not just taking classical images and just smashing it together. He's completely original, and I like where he and Kanye took it. He's definitely pushing the envelope."

The problem comes when you ask which direction the envelope is being pushed. Some say it permanently raised the bar for hip-hop videos, but Leofalcon said when it comes to male/female relations, "Power" goes the same old route. "What are all the women doing below him?" she asked. "What message is that sending? We're already dealing with inequality between men and women, particularly in hip-hop. I'm sick and tired of having a bunch of girls surrounding a man in videos in general.

"I would challenge Kanye to have a woman by his side to give the message that there is equality between him and a beautiful woman," she added.

"He's showing his position of power. He indulges in the women," Wordspit countered. "I could understand that you want him to have a woman by his side. It probably would have looked cool. ... But at the same time, Kanye is a loner. Kanye feels like he's alone. And I think that was one of the purposes of this video — to just show that even though I'm in a position of power. I'm still mortal."

Misha T broke down the video like this: "The song is called 'Power.' When you're on top, everybody's trying to bring you down to claim that spot. He's trying to show you this picture-perfect world where, yeah, you have goddesses surrounding you. But at the same time, you have guys trying to stab you in the back."

And that sword over his head? It's the Sword of Damocles. Don't even get us started on that ...

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1645307/20100806/west_kanye.jhtml

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