One thing that I am not is touchy about the fact that I love what I love. And I love Moleskine notebooks.  And I love manual typewriters, especially the Hermes 3000, and I love quite a lot of other like-minded stuff.  Well, Moleskine notebooks are #122 in the list of Stuff While People Like. Sad but true.

This particular type of notebook is very expensive and was quite popular with writers and artists in the olden days.  Needless to say, these are two properties that are highly coveted in the white community.   In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to know that white people like anything that old writers and artists liked:  typewriters, journals, suicide, heroin, and trains are just a few examples.

Let’s see what else I like that white people like — the bold ones I feel especially strong about:

• #122 Moleskine Notebooks
• #120 Taking a Year Off
• #119 Sea Salt
• #115 Promising to Learn a New Language
• #108 Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music
• #107 Self Aware Hip Hop References
• #106 Facebook
• #99 Grammar
• #98 The Ivy League
• #92 Book Deals
• #90 Dinner Parties
• #88 Having Gay Friends
• #81 Graduate School
  
• #80 The Idea of Soccer
• #79 Modern Furniture
• #78 Multilingual Children
• #77 Musical Comedy
• #73 Gentrification
• #72 Study Abroad
• #70 Difficult Breakups
• #61 Bicycles
• #58 Japan
• #57 Juno
• #56 Lawyers
• #55 Apologies
• #54 Kitchen Gadgets
• #53 Dogs
• #52 Sarah Silverman
• #51 Living by the Water
• #50 Irony
• #49 Vintage
• #48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops
• #47 Arts Degrees
• #46 The Sunday New York Times
• #45 Asian Fusion Food
• #44 Public Radio
• #43 Plays
• #42 Sushi
• #39 Netflix
• #38 Arrested Development
• #37 Renovations
• #36 Breakfast Places
• #35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report
• #34 Architecture
• #25 David Sedaris
• #24 Wine
• #23 Microbreweries
• #21 Writers Workshops
• #20 Being an expert on YOUR culture
• #19 Traveling
• #18 Awareness
• #16 Gifted Children
• #14 Having Black Friends
• #13 Tea
• #8 Barack Obama
• #7 Diversity
• #6 Organic Food
• #5 Farmer’s Markets
• #3 Film Festivals
• #2 Religions their parents don’t belong to
• #1 Coffee

Holy fuck, I am pretty darn white!

Bloody great, best-in-breed, article about online PR and marketing ethics by my buddy David Gelles of the Financial Times — he is surely a golden child and new media journalist rock star… be sure to put this article in front of your boss, whether you are a PR flack or are a corporate stooge — I think this article is actually going to be printed into the pink pages of the FT on Thursday, February 12 — go pick it up and hand it to the members of the C-suite, Blogs that spin a web of deception:

A web of deception By David Gelles

An overenthusiastic em­ployee from the computer supplies maker Belkin posted an offer online last month – $0.65 for anyone willing to write a positive review of Belkin products on Amazon.com. Several people took up the offer, producing gushing appraisals of Belkin products they had never used.

After a blogger exposed the scam, news organisations jumped on the story. The offer was removed and Belkin’s president weighed in with an apology.

The incident was a public relations disaster for Belkin. It was also a prime example of “Astroturfing”, the unsavoury marketing practice of generating fake grassroots enthusiasm for a product.

Given the anonymity afforded by the internet, it is hardly surprising that deceptive marketing is on the rise. Consumers are spending more time online and companies are seeking new ways to reach them.

But now, in an effort to regulate how employees behave on the web, companies and industry groups are developing their own online codes of ethics. They want to ensure that when staff do engage with social media, they act ethically.

Last year, Coca-Cola established its own set of social media guidelines and distributed them in a memo to all employees. The policy emphasises the need for transparency and encourages employees to use common sense when discussing the brand online. “We’ve always had very diverse channels to reach consumers,” says Adam Brown (pictured), digital communications director. “Wherever they are, that’s where we go. That’s now evolved into the need for a social media policy.”

So when Mr Brown went online to promote Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl advertisements, he followed the guidelines. On Facebook, Mr Brown announced that he was a Coke employee and pointed other users to the Coke ads on YouTube. On Pittsburgh Steelers fan forums, Mr Brown, who is from Pittsburgh, named his employer and then directed fans to the Coke blog, which had an interview with Steelers’ defensive star Troy Polamalu.

Mr Brown said more deliberate engagement with online conversations was a necessity for a global company such as Coca-Cola. “We’re mentioned several thousand times a day on blogs, and there are several hundred tweets about us on Twitter,” he says. “There is a lot of conversation taking place about our brand without us. Where appropriate, we wanted to start getting involved.”

Companies began interacting with social media years ago. But only recently have those involved with the industry perceived a need to develop ethical standards. Among the first to do so was The Word of Mouth Marketing Association, an organisation for the viral and buzz marketing industry. Womma published an ethics code in 2005, emphasising honesty of relationship, opinion and identity.

Since then, many companies have used the Womma code as a blueprint for their own guidelines. “Companies are learning every day that there is a right way and a wrong way to engage with social media,” says Paul Rand, vice-president of Womma’s board and head of its ethics project. “Some companies are learning by touching the burning pot; some companies are learning from the mistakes of ­others.”

One company that “touched the burning pot” is Shelfari, a social networking site for book lovers, owned by Amazon. As it battled for market share in late 2007, it came under fire for its poor design and clunky user interface. Soon, comments appeared on more than 50 blogs attesting to Shelfari’s greatness. “I have been on Shelfari for a couple of months now and absolutely love it,” read one. “Shelfari is such a great site. I joined a couple of months ago and I have been hooked on it ever since,” read another.

But all the comments were posted by the same user, “schaufferwaffer”, who was soon exposed as a Shelfari employee. Shelfari’s chief executive admitted to the Astroturfing (he blamed it on an intern who knew no better), and promised it would never happen again.

Such behaviour is declared out of line in the “disclosure best practices toolkit”, an ethics code drawn up by the Blog Council, an organisation for heads of social media at big companies. The document advises employees and agencies to announce whom they work for when communicating with blogs or bloggers. It also encourages employees to provide a means for contacting them directly, if someone they interact with via social media wants to follow up with a two-way conversation. The toolkit also warns against using pseudonyms.

IBM was one of the first companies to develop its own social media policy. In 2005, it published its “social computing guidelines”, which insist that employees write under their own names, using the first person, and make it clear they are speaking for themselves and not on behalf of IBM. It also prohibits employees from referencing clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.

UPS is developing its own online ethics policy after recognising how damaging Astro­turfing and other online misbehaviour can be for a company’s reputation. “If one of our airplanes goes down, we have a very clear plan for getting information to the media,” says Norman Black, director of global media services. “We realised we did not have a good plan for responding to a crisis on the ­internet.”

In some countries, deceptive marketing practices are not only frowned upon but also illegal. In the UK, the law identifies “falsely representing oneself as a consumer” as a punishable offence. And in 2006, the US Federal Trade Commission issued regulations stating that word-of-mouth marketers must disclose their relationships. But in spite of these new rules there has been little enforcement of the measures.

Even without prosecution, Belkin seems to have learnt its lesson. Melody Chalaban, speaking for the company, says Belkin will soon be holding seminars to teach employees how to interact ethically with social media, and is also considering joining Womma. “We want to stress that this is an isolated incident,” says Ms Chalaban. “We don’t endorse or condone unethical practices like this.”

Side Bar: The last post: underhand tactics can end in a PR disaster

* Flogging. Fake blogs can help companies get a personal voice behind a marketing campaign – but they risk a PR disaster if they are uncovered. When Sony tried to boost sales of its PSP portable gaming unit, it started a blog supposedly by two boys who wanted PSPs for Christmas. When it was revealed as a fake, Sony apologised and took it down.

* Astroturfing. A technique that gets its name from the practice of generating fake grassroots enthusiasm. One Florida company, PayPerPost, serves as a matchmaker between companies willing to pay for good press and bloggers willing to plug products that they have never used. After receiving criticism, PayPerPost now requires bloggers to disclose that their posts are sponsored.

* Comment spamming. Flooding the comment fields of blogs with enthusiastic notes about a company, even with full disclosure, is not welcomed by web users. When a Motorola employee commented on dozens of posts on a technology blog – each comment a plug for the new Motorola Krave – bloggers responded with snide criticisms of his spamming, which duly ceased.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

The future of Social Network Services (SNS) can be discovered on High School and College campuses. I believe that topic-specific “vertical” SNS’s are very important, but I also think that the model needs to be University-like – a modularized SNS. There needs to be a campus “brand” (or University) within which the topic-specific “clubs,” “houses,” “fraternities,” “dorms,” and “interest groups” can interact – somewhere where crossovers, cross-fertilization, and aggregation are encouraged – no, needs – to happen. I hate SNS sites like boompa.com – a site devoted to your favorite cars – because I am not JUST a car guy.

I am a car guy for sure but I am also interested in rowing, in biking, in Thomas Pynchon, and in talk radio – Boompa might be successful in the short term, but in the long-term, the real power would come from creating a open, creative, resource-rich platform/campus/university/high school and maybe create a school of engineering, a liberal arts school, a law school, a dining hall, and so forth, but then allow the SNS to find itself.

To allow the SNS and its members to find their own voice, their own interests, and their own passions – which may well be very different from what is first assumed by the creator. Google gets this, though not yet within the construct of the SNS’s. What Google did do successfully was to buy USENET – the original newsgroups – and then build an superstructure on top of that – make it modern, sustainable, durable, and more readable.

Google returned USENET to relevance in a world that considered newsgroups and IRC to be dead or dying. Each and every one of communities on USENET is amazingly vertical, but they could all back up and back out to the larger USENET community – to the equivalent of the “welcome new students??? meetings and gatherings colleges offer to entering Freshmen.

Communities that are too vertical tend to shoe horn the “general topics??? conversations into hidden “off topic??? eddies. That is just the opposite of what should be done. The conversation should be general, cross-pollinating, and then move, after a conversation starts, into another room.

Start with an amazing platform, collect users, listen and watch them to see how they’re playing with the software application objects, widgets, and tools (are they playing with the toy or the box?), and then build for the users base, withholding judgment. Digg is a case study for this: start small, grow organically, and allow your members to find themselves.

The developers of Digg realized that after initial vertical growth based on the general members of Slashdot (techie, geeky, teens, boys), digg would suffer from the same sort of vulnerabilities that Slashdot suffered when Slashdot didn’t evolve and grow and broaden itself.

People love talking about Linux, but when happens when the Dow drops or the elections come? Where will the conversation happen? Where is the “kitchen??? at the party where every eventually goes to just talk about general interest stuff? Unless there are opportunities to express and share so-called “off-topic??? conversation right there, within the community in which members are already committed, with members to whom they’re already committed, then they are bound to go elsewhere.

Starting small and allowing the community to design itself is much different than starting big and losing one’s focus. Other mistakes happen when community builders make assumptions as to what participants, members, and lurkers want. Another mistake is putting a wall up around the community so that non-members cannot get a full feeling for the community from without.

The best SNS’s, virtual worlds, and online communities are honeypots. By honeypot, I am not suggesting, “a server that is configured to detect an intruder by mirroring a real production system. It appears as an ordinary server doing work, but all the data and transactions are phony. Located either in or outside the firewall, the honeypot is used to learn about an intruder’s techniques as well as determine vulnerabilities in the real system.” Although I am, sort of. The best SNS needs to be appealing, attractive, sweet, and compelling. Community-builders and SNS ASP developers need to be willing learn about member techniques, interests, processes, and needs, as well as determine “vulnerabilities” in the SNS platform that may repel, turn off, or limit the evolution and growth of the community.

To channel Chauncey Gardener for a second, one must do whatever one must to make sure that the earth in the garden is moist and well fed, one must seed well and completely, one must keep the garden in sun and water, one must encourage the garden to grow as it will for only in its growth will the garden be successful, and then, after rigorous growth, pruning and weeding must be done, only in order to allow the garden to be healthy, not to turn the garden into topiary. Okay, I am done.

Digg allows all of these things. Digg is perfectly useful and compelling even as an alien, but it is way more fun and interesting when you’re a citizen, that’s for sure. An SNS community needs to be as attractive as possible because exclusivity is no longer essential or even valuable. What is valuable is “useful,??? “interesting,??? and “authentic.??? They also have to have community buy-in and the best enjoy a certain fanatical devotion. Just like the best Universities and Colleges.

And Digg allowed its member to tell it when it was time to evolve past tech and geek news. Digg did not limit its scope or define itself too tightly with being “gear for geeks??? or “news for nerds.??? That would have ultimately been the death of Digg.

What the best Universities (such as Yale) understand is that it is not the student who is blessed and honored by being accepted by a top college (Yale College) but rather it is the college that should be blessed and honored (and should be grateful) that such a quality student is accepting its offers and actually attending – choosing – their particular school: Yale instead of Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, etc…

Harvard, too, is aware that although in the short-term Harvard makes the Harvard Man, over the long term, it is Harvard Men who made Harvard and continue to make Harvard. “Who have you graduated recently???? Unless the quality and character of its students and alumni remain top-drawer, Harvard is not guaranteed its position as “top three??? in USA Today alongside Princeton and Yale. No matter how grand its endowment.

So, Harvard and Yale spoil their students rotten! My friends who attended Harvard or Yale college swoon over those 4 years like I swoon over my first love.

Likewise, SNS’s, virtual worlds, and virtual communities need to realize that at any one point, their brand is only as good as the collective that is manifest in the users, the members, the lurkers, the stewards, and the alumni of the property.

This isn’t only true in SNS’s. The same thing can be said of the most successful message boards and online communities. The most important distinction, I think, is that all of these “rooms” and all of these “clubs” and all of these spaces where (and are) defined and created by the communities themselves. Sui generis. And this sort of ownership – “for us by us,??? as the slogan goes over as Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community – should never be underestimated.

The Well has Howard Rheingold as a member and alumnus, for example, and the credibility of all that he has made and done; over time, more and more virtual communities, virtual worlds, and SNS will be known for their members as well: who studies, who studied, and who wants to join.

“What’s in it for me??? (WIIFM) and the concept of pride of ownership are important – essential – ingredients of a sustainable, deep, thriving, and healthy community. The success of MySpace and of Facebook is that the verticals are not (were not) defined for them by their grand architects – they are self-creating, self-forming, and also self-destructing. They form, reform, mutate and disperse after they hit a limit of general conversation and then either break off and reform into an “interest group” or “club” or they self-check and work to “get back on topic.”

SNS’s and communities in general tend to be formed in one of two ways: like Paris or like London. Intelligence Design (architecture) or Emergent Design. The later never looks very beautiful or the way people – or the creators, investors, and architects – expect (or want) it to look, because investors and designers tend to not be able to control it – and when they do try to impost order, often in a heavy-handed way, they also tend to scare off all of their members, too.

This organic revolution has proven its success online time and time again. The Internet does not respond (well or at all) to command and control. The smartest Web 2.0 platforms allow the “masses of asses” (yes, the customer; yes, us) to define the platform and the experience – their own and collective environment and experience.

MySpace does this amazingly well and so does Facebook. Until recently, Friendster suffered from a vision and used command and control tactics to try to coerce its users that “it didn’t really want to do things that way??? and Friendster members abandoned in droves to platforms and experiences not so monitored by “mom and dad.???

A command and control grand vision doesn’t work when you develop an environment that needs to be truly both attractive and compelling much more than it needs to be informational or instructional. An SNS needs to be attractive, diversional, compelling, amusing, and entertaining – never limiting.

My analogy of college and high school never mentioned classrooms or classes for training or learning. People do enough of that at school and at work. An SNS needs to give its users a university campus without any expectations or concepts of dropping out, getting judged, doing homework, or being held accountable for anything.

A good SNS should be all late-night wine-influenced discussions of Descartes and Plato and the summer afternoons on the quad and the time playing Xbox with your roommates.

When I go onto my long-term online communities, the Well, The Meta Network, USENET, and Brainstorms, there are many very deep and very vertical communities, discussing things as frivolous as fashion and video games and as deep as how to survive cancer, how to get a post doc grant, and very deep discussions on “spirit,” “chaos theory,” and “world politics.”

What makes this amazing and sustainable is that there are an infinite number of ways to get along, to move into a space of intense conversation, and then to pull back into common areas, just to see who’s around. In a university setting, this could be the dining hall, the quad, the commons, etc. These spaces are very important.

If you think about all of this in terms of evolution, then we can think about the way things evolve in the most perverse ways when isolated from others of its kinds. So, if there are impervious walls – gaps or voids, mountains or ridges – between these vertical markets, SNS’s, and communities, then there may be an initial success, but there can also be a terrible volatility. One plague or drought can decimate a population completely.

Having a commons allows members and visitors to have a place to meet new people, have new experiences, and learn of new clubs, new opportunities, and new places – inbreeding versus crossbreeding. Ultimately, a diversity of visitors helps build a more resilient, invested, and self-identifing community. They will become “students for life??? at best and proud alums at worst. They will carry the brand awareness, even if their lives become too busy to participate any more.

They will become life long brand ambassadors for your community. Proud alumni.

And, in terms of “viral marketing,” it is also important when it comes to a member of an SNS “inviting his friends” – not all of my friends have the same vertical interests that I do… They could have very different interests – but as I explore the “commons” of an SNS, I can note that there are things happening online that “friend x” and “friend y” would love, and that would be my incentive to invite them on board.

Boompa? I am the only person I know in my entire community – that is not true, my buddy has an Audi S4 – who is into cars. My buddy is an Audi driver and I am a BMW driver. Does that mean we’re both drivers? Does that mean we love cars or our particular car? Do we cross over on performance sedans? On German cars? On luxury cars?

You have to offer the tools to allow the market to choose for itself, otherwise, you might never find out that the SNS needs all three, or none at all.

A “Modularized SNS” should be neutral like a university (unlike MySpace, which is pretty pre-defined as to what the demographic is), and there are lots of “vertical niche SNS’s” (e.g. car enthusiasts, gourmet cooking, travel, Rolex fans, Republican politicos, etc.) That way, everyone can form a SNS experience that actually fits them by modularly assembling the groups of people who have similar interests, (not just friends-in-common!)

When I sell Abraham Harrison‘s blogger outreach and blogger PR services I tend to focus on the initial promotional and profile benefits associated with having hundreds of highly targeted organic earned media blog posts show up almost overnight on behalf of our clients.  If you would like to know what this sort of campaign looks like, check out our case studies.

That’s not it, there’s more. As I have mentioned before, unlike SEM, these blog posts, reviews, and mentions are permenant and not ephemeral.

Finally, there is the issue of the powerful and amazing SEO benefits associated with having over 100 bloggers choose to write about your brand, product, campaign, or service.

Unlike pay-for-play services like Review Me, PayPerPost, or IZEA, the blog posts written by the bloggers we reach out to are not pay per post, they are earned media.  When my team and I reach out to our A-Z list bloggers along dozens of verticals targets, it is up to each blogger to choose to accept our message and decide that what we’re offering is worthwhile to post or Twitter.

There is real power associated with this sort of thing. Like any journalistic or consumer-generated promotional pitching, results are not guaranteed; however, we have done this for over two yearsd and our penetration, success, and results have improved over time.

If you want to see the sort of posts that are associated with this kind of blogger PR pitch outreach, here are some examples:

• Thank You All Who Supported International Medical Corps!
• Thank You Operation Survivor Bloggers
• Thank You International Medical Corps Bloggers
• Thank You Again Survivor Corps Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Bloggers
• Book Promotion with Blogger PR 

I am always to allow these things to be as transparent as possible.  What’s more, linking back to all of the fine blog posts that bloggers have shoehorned into their busy days is sort of a link love thank you.

And, to be honest, Google thinks were the bees knees because the content that our messaging drives real content. In all cases, we’re at the mercy of the blogger — if we’re not smart, generous, engaging, charming, positive, responsive, and even supportive, we’ll get tarred and feathered, and so will out client.

We’re better than that.

With each blogger outreach that results in a hundred or more organic earned media, highly-textual, brand-centric, keyword-dense and diverse, and often times almost completely based on the Social Media News Releases (SMNRs) we create for the client, the level of powerful Google, Live.com, Technorati, Ask.com, and Yahoo! love is not only formidable, but, over time, and much sooner than you think, both our social media new releases as well as our blogged content can challenge our clients for top-spot, which is OK because we’re not their competitor.

Here are some examples of client SMNRs we especially like, feel free to check them out:

• http://anamigo.smnr.us
• http://freshair.smnr.us
• http://banclusterbombs.smnr.us
• http://freshairfundcounselors.smnr.us
• http://survivorcorps.smnr.us
• http://iwillnotbebroken.smnr.us
• http://internationalmedicalcorps.smnr.us

I have almost ten-years of SEO experience and have always done things the right way, and Social Media and Blogger PR is the right way. None of us coerce any of our bloggers into blogging, we’re just able to figure out how to appeal, how to give, how to engage, how to message, and how to ask for what we want from our long tail list of upwards of 500 A-list blogger and 30,000 B-Z list bloggers.

Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more or getting on a call with my Director, Dan, my CEO, Mark, and/or me, pop me an email and we’ll sort it out.

(Via Marketing Conversation)

I just received this email from Frank Luntz:

To: Friends & Family
From: Frank Luntz
Re: A New Beginning
Date: November 5, 2008

---

The end of the most interesting election in modern times will also be the end of my career with Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research. Having sold my company to the good people of Omnicom, it’s time to move on.

When I hired my first employee and opened up an office in the basement of my townhouse in 1992, I never dreamed that I would someday have the honor of working for presidents, prime ministers, and CEOs of the world’s most successful companies and most influential foundations. Our roster of corporate and public affairs clients is unprecedented for a firm of our size, and I’m so deeply proud of them and the positive impact they have had on their customers, their communities, and the world at large.

I am also grateful for the privilege of analyzing the great events and social trends of our time in so many diverse public settings. While I may have a face for radio and a voice for newspapers, the willingness of so many network presidents and executive producers to give me the opportunity to apply the skills of public opinion to explain the who, what and why of the world are some of the most fulfilling and enjoyable moments of my career. I can never adequately thank them for making life so interesting and invigorating.

But a time comes in everyone’s career where it becomes important to tackle new challenges and scale new mountains. Now is as good a time as any to get out of DC and start examining more closely what is really happening in American life and culture. I also want to take my research of words to an entirely different level, applying it where it has never been applied before. There’s a lot I still want to learn and do – and staring at the Pacific Ocean from Santa Monica, California is as good a place as any to do it from.

So while I will be leaving my home and my company, I am certainly not retiring or disappearing. I’m much too young and much too excited about what’s ahead. But I don’t plan to work as hard – at least that’s the plan. Those of you who know me well know that I work 18 hour days, seven days a week. This year alone I will have flown more than 300 days and logged 300,000 miles … and frankly … I’m tired. I need this change of scenery and change of pace to recharge my batteries and extend my shelf life.

Not everything will change, however. I have been offered and accepted the privilege of serving as “Chairman Emeritus,” of LMSR, a title normally reserved for people who live past their sell-by date. And while I may be gone, the company name will remain the same, as will the team I have painstakingly assembled over the past decade. These are uniquely capable people with solid research experience and the most creative brains I have ever worked with. I recommend them highly for all your research needs.

And if you are looking for advice and guidance, I’m definitely still around and still in business.

To end on a personal note, I did not learn until the death of my father how much he enjoyed my frantic calls asking him for help or guidance – and that he missed them when I grew old enough to handle these tasks on my own. You don’t realize how much I appreciated the chance to serve you – even when the calls were late and the tasks were tough. While I have made my share of mistakes, I do not regret a single minute. You have given me a very fulfilling life, and I thank you for making it worth living.

Frank

Here’s a version of this email online.

I have finally gotten around to catching up on all the Atlantics that have piled up in my absence in Berlin. One very compelling article is an anonymous essay written by “Professor X,” In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.

I am still trying to sort out my thoughts on this — please excuse the disjointed nature of this post. Would you be so kind as to comment?  Maybe a conversation is just what I need to sort this out.

The premise is that many of the colleges and universities that populate the United States are are not actually members of the Ivory Tower.

And, if they are part of the Ivory Tower, they are in the basement. As a professor at one of these “basement” schools, Professor X suggests that the majority of the students who come through his English class should not be there — that America’s obsession with college educations, graduate schooling, and professional degrees as de rigeur is seriously messed up.

Why?  Because not everyone is capable of becoming collegiate.

America is a land of opportunity where everyone is equal and all it takes is hard work and focus to do whatever  and become whatever one desires. According to In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, however, this is not so.  From his vast experience teaching remedial high school-level English classes in the guise of Introduction to College Writing (English 101) and Introduction to College Literature (English 102), Professor X believes that the vast investment of time, money, debt, and academic shame associated with going to college if you’re neither prepared or intellectually capable of doing so can be ruinous to the finances, ego, pride, and self-esteem of all of the folks who fail out, still saddled with relatively enormous loans and a send of abject failure associated — all for naught!

I never believed this, myself — all of my friends are bloody brilliant — but I have started to begin to believe, especially in light of the sort of comments I have been receiving in response to my series of incendiary posts about Whales:

• Will Subliterate 17-Year-Olds Save the Whales?
• Wisdumb of Crowds: SAVE THE WHALES
• “Don’t Save the Whales” Review: “you obviously is idiot”
• u are a bitter old man all alone trying to get attion because u are lonly and missible
• May God Have Mercey [sic] on your Souls

I know. I can’t stop making fun — and that I am in fact an Awful Awful Man but I am actually starting to wonder what I can do to encourage these kids that actually saving whales requires a rigorous education and lots of training and support. Saving whales requires amazing copy writing skills and the ability to network, fundraise, and communicate.

Are these commenters “just young” or are they just “communicating casually?” I was pretty literate and intellectually curious when I was in 6-12th grade!

I was writing and researching and participating in my school’s newspaper from 7th grade (my high school spanned 7-12th grade).  So where all of my geeky, nerdy, intellectual friends, too.  I was a book worm. I preferred to spend my time in Hawaii at the library than I did the beach.

I think the problem lies in the incestuous nature of intellectualism, of the academy, of the Ivory Tower, and of the social network associated with urban centers, university towns, and professional and corporate communities.

I was at BlogPotomac the other week and everyone there said that they suffered from Social Network Burnout — but outside of the Social Network Maven world, most people may have a MySpace or Facebook profile, but that’s it — no digg, del.icio.us, reddit, Plurk, Pownce, or anything else!

The same thing happens with regards liberal Democrats in the USA — everyone in NY, DC, Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco, Connecticut, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Chicago, only know Democrats, activists, and people who voted for Gore, Kerry, and who support Choice and evolution in schools — but that’s not America proper!

I mean, of course there is great diversity of belief, politics, and passion, but extrapolating personal beliefs and political, professional, and academic expectations can result in the sort of myopia that can not just leave children behind but might just well leave most Americans behind as well.

What is the current state of vocational training in America?  Why are our public universities, colleges, and community colleges so limited in their scope?  Should these publicly-funded places offer training and services for everyone, where everyone includes opportunity for lives wearing other collars than white!

I see this all the time in technology and the Internet — people just aren’t interested in being geeky. There is no interest there, even when I get into conversations with doctors and lawyers. I always took to being a geek. I always took to being a book worm. Mind you, my parents were both bookish and in the art world, so I guess my vector was partially chosen for me.

Much of the time, it all comes down to just not being interested. Not caring at all. The “I don’t have time for this shit” theory when you’re sitting in class wondering why you’re there instead of at your desk or in the store or at you job, making money for today, tomorrow, and for your family.

Life is messy and there is no need to make it any harder.  Yes, I understand that there is a lot of incentive for these college and universities to broaden their appeal to just about everyone, but my friends like to speak of “opportunity costs” — will going to business school and spending two years in school add to your marketability and brand more than staying in your current job?  What is the opportunity cost of attending a college, spending money you don’t have, and then fail out?  What is the opportunity when you try your hardest and can’t handle the stress or have too many things going on in your life to actually spend the time and attention required to thrive in academia.

I think one of the issue here has to do with our K-12 education. There are quite a few high school graduates who need to basically redo high school — especially if they are returning to college after years away as mature students.

Back in the day, there were all sorts of public services and night schools that were virtually free — they allowed people to take remedial course, to bone up before moving on, and to learn English as a second language.  Are these sorts of services still serving Americans or have they all become privatized into the sundry schools soliciting me late at night?

Please join me in the comments — I would love to continue the conversation and sort out my thoughts along with you.  Thanks in advance.

Abraham & Harrison offers its clients comprehensive Online Conversation Marketing campaigns based on the core fundamentals of effective Marketing Communication techniques. We integrate Online Publicity, Online Grassroots & New Media Marketing, Business Intelligence and Search Engine Services to ensure that our clients’ message, the right message, is being portrayed in every corner of the digital space. Additionally, we offer our expertise in the areas of profiling, intelligence, forensics and crisis management. Although Abraham & Harrison offers its clients the ability to cherry pick the services that best suit their needs, we strongly suggest customized, tailored packages of services for most clients, as our experience has proven the power of an integrated, comprehensive approach.

Please see our website for further information: http://www.chrisabraham.com/

Abraham Harrison LLC Services

Online Publicity and Blogger Relations

Not unlike traditional public relations, the Abraham & Harrison Online Publicity and Blogger Relations strategy not only identifies the right people for you to be talking to, but also connects these people with your brand and your message. In targeting the true online opinion leaders, we are able to not only hone in on the demographic communities that matter most to your brand, but also promote your products and services in a favorable light. Online Public Relations is an ideal brand awareness and brand promotion solution for small to mid-sized businesses looking to increase their visibility online. In leveraging the constant flow of online chatter, the Abraham & Harrison team creates and fosters relationships based on like-mindedness, or the opinion leader’s likelihood to be receptive to your brand and messaging. It is the relationship building aspect of this program that makes Online Publicity an optimal solution for prospective clients that have the infrastructure to support and maintain relationships with interested parties.

Examples of typical Online Publicity campaigns include: Event Publicity, New Product Launches, Crisis Communication, Brand Re-Information Campaigns, Overall Brand Awareness/Promotional Efforts.

Online Grassroots and New Media Marketing

Also referred to as Online Advocacy or Online Guerilla Marketing, Online Grassroots and New Media Marketing is an integrated approach to identifying and reaching your targeted demographic from the bottom up. These programs are a quick and effect means of spreading news and information to a targeted network of online influencers within the blogosphere, message boards, video communities, social bookmarking sites, listservs, etc. This strategy involves the development of key creative and general messaging by the client and allowing our team of Online Grassroots experts to run with it, determining the best way to roll that up into what the demographic audience would be most receptive to. As opposed to the much targeted approach of Online Publicity, Online Grassroots Marketing allows us to capitalize on the “long tail,” or the complex nature of online chatter in which dialogue about our client’s brands isn’t always localized within its primary, secondary or tertiary demographic targets.

Examples of typical Online Grassroots Marketing campaigns include: Social Network Marketing, Asset Distribution, Social Media Marketing, Viral Marketing.

Business Intelligence

Collectively, the Abraham & Harrison Management Team has over 5 decades of global branding and marketing communication strategy experience. It is with these years of experience that we have learned that for some clients, their bottom line is most affected by having real-time, accurate business intelligence information about market landscape, trends in their overall brand perception and valuable online opinion about their competitors. The deliverable on these initiatives is a comprehensive, detailed report, evaluating and analyzing trends within the mediasphere; blogosphere; user generated content outlets, message boards and forums. The Online Business Intelligence service also gives the prospective client to determine which demographic communities about which they are most interested in gaining information. These reports can be delivered as a one-time State of the Union analysis or as an ongoing trend analysis, depending on the client’s needs.

Search Engine Services

Brand of the world, large and small, know that visibility of favorable content within key search engines can make or break your marketing and public relations initiatives. In addition to offering tailored marketing communication and business intelligence solutions to our clients, Abraham & Harrison is also a full-service Search Engine Marketing agency. Programs falling within this department include: Traditional Search Engine Optimization (Promotion), Defensive Search Engine Optimization (Protection), Domain Name Protection and Domain Name Services.

Online Reputation Clean-Up and Defense

Despite providing Internet users with a wealth of accurate information, some brands have faced the hard reality of the adverse affects that negative online chatter and mis-information can have. Fortunately, the majority of these trends can be reversed, if treated early and in the right way. By providing clients in need of Online Reputation Clean-Up and Defense services, the Abraham & Harrison team harnesses the power of an integrated approach to attach negative opinions and misinformation from all sides. In combining our Search Engine Services (including Domain Name and Defensive SEO), Online Public Relations, Business Intelligence and our Online Grassroots and New Media Marketing Programs, the Abraham & Harrison team is able to deliver quick results. In the past, we have proven effective in minimizing the visibility of unfavorable content online, countering misinformation with real information and creating valuable allies among online opinion leaders on behalf of our clients.

About the Founding Partners

Mark Harrison, Founding Partner and CEO

Mr. Harrison’s unique history of professional experience blends technology, education, business, and international affairs. Trained as a diplomat, Mr. Harrison has worked with UNHCR, the IMF, and the World Bank Group. He has served as a political functionary, technologist, and journalist in the US, Europe, Thailand, Israel, Tanzania, and Guatemala.

He has served as CTO and Technical Counsel to a companies ranging from Fortune 500′s to start-ups, and has guided projects across the globe. He served as a technology adviser to Primedia, the US media conglomerate, Channel One, the world’s largest in-school education and television news network, and largest minority-owned TV network in the US. He has built systems and infrastructures for the afore-mentioned organizations as well as a number of other major corporations including Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and Bell Atlantic/Verizon. Mr. Harrison currently acts as CTO and marketing adviser to Techcelerator, the Silicon Valley venture development firm headed by tomandandy.com’s Tom Hajdu. He is also an associate of Joseph Jaffe’s New York based new media marketing company, crayon LLC.

Over the past 15 years, Mr. Harrison has taught at the secondary, university, and post-graduate levels in the US, Canada, Germany &Tanzania, and has developed curricula in business, academic methodology, languages, and technology. Mr. Harrison has lived and worked in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America and speaks English, German, French, Swahili, and Spanish.

Chris Abraham, President and Founding Partner

Chris Abraham is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant, and adviser to the industries leading firms, specializing in web2.0 technologies, including content syndication, online collaboration, blogging, and consumer generated media. Chris is a leading expert on corporate and PR blogging with a focus on citizen journalism, new marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

In addition to his roles as consultant and analyst, Mr. Abraham currently acts as Chief Marketing Officer and technology adviser to Techcelerator, the Silicon Valley venture development firm headed by tomandandy.com’s, Tom Hajdu. He is also an associate of Joseph Jaffe’s New York based new media marketing company, crayon LLC.

Mr. Abraham is one of the internet’s social media pioneers, having entered the scene in the early 1980′s in the days of BBS’s via dial-up over 200 Baud acoustic modems. Throughout the 1990′s, he was a core member of the ground-breaking, Washington, DC-based Meta Network (TMN), and its parent company, Caucus Systems where in 1999 what is today known as “Web 2.0″ and “Enterprise 2.0″ was defined in colleague Tom Mandel’s whitepaper “How Companies Think – Creating Collaborative Intelligence Online” and executed on a daily basis for companies, universities, and organizations via the seminal social media platform, Caucus Software. For more than a decade, Mr. Abraham laid the groundwork for today’s modern social media as an online facilitator with Caucus Systems clients serving such clients as IBM and the US Government, and teaching with the University of Kalamazoo in the Education for the Arts project – the world’s first accredited online high school course in creative writing.

Before moving to his current position, Mr. Abraham was a Senior Account Supervisor and a member of the Interactive Team at Edelman in Washington, DC, doing online public affairs. Before joining Edelman, Chris was Technology Strategist for New Media Strategies, a pioneer and industry leader in online brand promotion and brand protection. At NMS, Chris directed the technology strategy for the firm, including the development, deployment, and launch of client and internal corporate blogs, marketing blogs, vertical industry blogs, PR blogs, promotional blogs, public affairs blogs, social networks, and podcasts.

Prior to joining NMS, Chris was a Washington-based technologist for over a decade. As Managing Director for Berlin-based beehive North America, Chris focused on developing web applications and offering training for corporate clients such as Pfizer. As GNU/Linux SA and online facilitator for Caucus Systems, Chris hosted virtual online events and communities of practice for clients such as IBM and eForum 2000.

Chris Abraham maintains the PR and marketing blogs, Because the Medium is the Message and Marketing Conversation. The blogs were originally designed as a laboratories in which to explore the media, the mediasphere, the blogosphere, marketing, PR, and buzz marketing but has expanded to become a media filter, including technology, blogging, pop culture, memetics, news, and analysis; meaning just about anything. Chris recently spoke about the main stream media and citizen journalism on the BBC World Service radio program World Have Your Say during the We Media conference in London.

Mr. Abraham is an active member and attendee of former US Ambassador Phil Lader’s Renaissance Weekend conference where together with other industry leaders, US Senators and Congressmen, former US Presidents, renowned artists and writers, and other cultural, political, and business leaders he has spoken on topics ranging from new media to technology futurism to virtual company management. He is an experienced sailor with thousands of blue water miles to his credit, an impassioned rower with his own single shell housed on the Potomac River, an avid bicyclist, a trained and qualified dive master, and an accomplished photographer with over 20 years of professional experience and thousands of images with the world’s top stock photo agencies.

Abraham & Harrison Vision Statement

In the rapidly changing world of marketing and public relations, the lines between traditional strategies and new media strategies continue to shift as the line separating the two is constantly moving. What was once viewed as impossible, is now quickly transforming into more and more of a science, with the Internet emerging as a unique and remarkable platform for consumer and business communication. Faster now, more than ever, people around the world are able to communicate with rapid fire quickness. Formerly “untappable,” obscure word-of-mouth is now a medium that many brands are leveraging to disseminate information; promote their products and services; as well as protect their namesakes. In this day and age, we don’t need to remind you of the Internet’s effects (be it favorable or dismal) on many popular brands. It is this phenomenon that has made Online Conversation Marketing an ideal solution for a variety of notable brands, ranging from Internet start-ups to public interest groups to major consumer brands.

Abraham & Harrison is comprised of a trained team of media, marketing and public relations experts working together to drive positive online presence on behalf of our clients. Operating in a “virtual office,” the Abraham & Harrison team is spread across four continents, representing more than 10 time zones and almost a dozen languages. This dispersion has given us a notable competitive edge, allowing us to quickly and effectively employ comprehensive Online Conversation Marketing Campaigns within more than 50 countries. Despite its benefits, the “virtual office” does not provide for the ideal environment for rapid response communication, in a traditional sense. Though Abraham & Harrison has proven its ability to provide crisis communication and react to changes in campaign strategy and messaging, we do not operate in a newsroom and are unable to collectively stop on a dime and refocus in the same way that traditional PR houses are able.

Online Conversation Marketing grew out of the increasing importance of relationships as it relates to effective branding via the Internet. Despite the wealth of information and opinions “out there,” Abraham & Harrison understands that an elite few lead sweeping trends in Online Conversation tone, volume and reach. These Online Opinion Leaders or Influencers continue to break news and share opinions that reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions of consumers everyday. Thus, the overarching strategy of Online Conversation Marketing is influencing the influencers – much like securing online endorsements on behalf of our clients. Unlike the formalized world of traditional marketing and PR, an effective Online Conversation Marketing Program takes much longer to develop, as Abraham & Harrison is in the business of securing positive relationships with often busy Opinion Leaders. We have been able to complete campaigns on behalf our clients in as little as 6 weeks, however, the turn around for the majority of brands is generally several weeks, if not months, longer. The “public” that we relate to is not the mainstream media, whose relationships can often be bought and sold; the “public” that we do relate to are the online influencers, who oftentimes, are no more than regular Internet users with a well crafted, interested blog or website that has drawn in its own audience. Although Abraham & Harrison already has a sundry of these influencers in pocket, we often have to develop new relationships on behalf of our clients, given their diverse demographic targets and needs.

Abraham & Harrison leverages email to conduct the majority of relationship building with online influencers, however, we are not a direct or email marketing agency. Often times, the opinion leaders that we contact on behalf of our clients are being reached “blindly,” meaning that they have not opted into any particular program. In order to effectively carry out these campaigns and still remain CAN-SPAM compliant, we pick and choose our targets carefully, ensuring that we provide them with relevant messaging and “gifts” or promotions or information that would be of interest to them. At the end of the day, much like traditional PR, a poorly thought out Online Outreach campaign (the facet of Online Conversation Marketing most like traditional PR in which we build relationships with popular bloggers and influencers on behalf of our clients) can result in little to no positive outcome for the client. It is for this reason that the ramp up time on these programs typically runs anywhere from one to three weeks, as we prepare lists of appropriate, likeminded targets that will likely respond well to our clients’ brands as well as development of appropriate, effective “messaging.”

All things to considered, it is also worth highlighting that unlike other Online Marketing and Advertising agencies, Abraham & Harrison does not thoughtlessly disseminate links and off-topic messaging throughout the user generated corners of the Internet. We value relationships and act as persuaders, storytellers and attractors on behalf of our brands. In working individually with online influencers and Internet users as both a macro (Online Outreach) and micro (Online Engagement, Grassroots Marketing) level, Abraham & Harrison builds relationships and drives favorable, organic conversation in a compliant fashion. The Abraham & Harrison methods reflect the natural progress of organic word-of-mouth – starting small and progressively growing to reach a larger and larger audience. In respecting the online community, the Abraham & Harrison team stands firmly against online solicitation (SPAM) of any kind. Both in Online Outreach and Online Engagement, we are fully transparent, or “open kimono.” We have found these methods to be the most effective when working with the “online public.”

As common conceptions of marketing relate to Online Conversation Marketing, Abraham & Harrison does operate neatly into the bucket of branding, as our methods are a combination of Search Engine Optimization, Grassroots Marketing and Online Public Relations. Clients in the past have likened us to online brand ambassadors. Such being said, we do not fit any pay-per-performance or CPM model. Our metrics are based on conversation and relationships rather than conversions and impressions, much akin to tradition grassroots and brand ambassador strategies.

To conclude, Abraham & Harrison is pleased to offer its unique Online Conversation Marketing services to an array of brands and organizations. Our past clients have found the mix of SEO, Online PR and Grassroots Marketing to be exceptionally effective in achieving their overall marketing objectives. Millions of people are talking online everyday – are you listening?

I bumped into Michelle Santos on Facebook yesterday and we Kama’ainas got super nostalgic all over each others’ Facebook Walls, and here are some excepts:

Michelle:

Aloha oe, Chris!! Pehea `oe? E pili mau na pomaika`i ia `oe!!!

Chris:

Aloha kakahiaka, Michelle. Mai ka’i no au. Aloha mai e!!

Michelle:

eh, howzit, Brah? Whaddsdascoops? when we do talk story? I miss da kine local grinds…opihi and combomeals…onolicious, man…Fo´real. Been back to da Rock lately?

Chris:

It’s been since 1998, which has been a decade, which is very sad. I don’t even know if I would move back if I had all the money in the world, although I have become very very nostalgic recently so I might try to make a trip this year or next year. I miss Zippy’s and Graces and I miss Kona and Manoa. I miss Sans Souci Beach right in front of the New Otani Kaimana Beach Hotel and I miss hanging out with my Kama’aina friends at Outrigger Canoe Club. I miss Scuba diving in Waianae and eating burgers at Kua Aina burger at North Shore. I miss North Shore and driving the circle island in my Triumph TR6. I miss talking pidgin and wonder if I am even fluent any more. Rap Replinger is still my favorite comedian of all time. How about you?

Michelle:

i came back 2006. It is a rough place if you are a local. But as a tourist it is fine…I miss the beaches. I lived next to Ala Moana Shopping Center where my apartment penthouse was across the beach. I missed swimming there every morning..Lanikai, North Shore, Waikiki night life, Hanohano Restaurant on Sheraton´s penthouse, Snorkeling, sharkdiving, skydiving (it´s warmer there than in Norway for this activity…brrrrr) I miss my moped ;) I had my car parked all the time and just zoomed with that everywhere. I also miss Tantalus where I used to live since I picked fresh Hawaiian flowers there every weekend. I miss the pancakes at Ken´s house in Big Island, the lilikoi pancake sauces, chocolate and caramel macadamia nuts, fresh kona coffee…Ward Center Theater…

Chris:

Everything is flooding now. I miss Volcano National Park. I miss Molokai and all the Duduois. I miss Manele Bay on Lanai. I miss the Parker Ranch and what Hilo used to be. I love love love taking the drive up to Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. I miss looking at the snow and the crazy telescopes up at the top of the world. I miss Madam Pele and Maui and Manapua and the Punahou carnival and I miss Kolaipuhaku and Kaimuki and the drive along Kalanianaole highway. I miss being tan and I miss freediving off of Diamondhead and of being a Divemaster. I miss using Velvia film and shooting beaches and bikinis. I miss seducing women by packing picknics and taking either the motorcycle or the convertible roadster on the circle island, stopping for shave ice with ice cream and azuki beans in Hale`iwa. Wow, lau lau — now I have to sing to you….

Michelle:

aaaawww…i can tell you miss it very much. I know…i miss taking my dates on private beach picnics. I have this private beach that I always get and have awesome sunsets by Gold Coast. Man, lau lau??? hehhehehe, it certainly better than poi. I have to put so much sugar on that poi. Double-whammy on the carbs! Yikes! You should see my picture in Diverse and see how tan I was…I miss that too. I didn´t even have to lay on the beach…I just get cooked…;)

Well, Michelle Santos has herself a blog, a firm, MJS Strategies, and actually blogged about our chat as well, Aloha oe! (Part 1).

The Montser Field was the coolest. We wandered upon wild pigs and dead things and got to see maggots, decay, and death. We built forts out of found things, and as the area slowly became built up and when that “highway” you see was starting to get built, the area was even more fun and more dangerous. One day, upon exploration, I stepped on a nail that went clear through my foot. I was pretty unaware of it, really, until I got home and realized that I had been training quite a lot of blood. Luckily, Hawaii has excellent health care and I was fine.

One of the greatest things about growing up in Hawaii is that “88%” of Hawaii is “minority” and I was, in Hawaii, myself a minority. I kind of like a great diversity and, as a result, I don’t see what all of this racist crap and all of this “us and them” shit is all about. I won’t say I am color blind, but I will say that I notice haole kids and adults much more readily than I do other folks.

Anyway, I will write more about my experience growing up in Hawaii a little later. I am out of steam at the moment.

Salt Lake, Hawaii From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Salt Lake is a suburban neighborhood of Honolulu, Hawai‘i on the island of O‘ahu. The area is also known as ?liamanu after a nearby crater, although Salt Lake itself is in a crater called ?lia pa‘akai — meaning “salt pond” in Hawaiian. The Salt Lake community was developed in the 1960s during the Hawai‘i construction boom, providing residents with an expansive view of downtown Honolulu and the sugarcane plantations of the central plain of O‘ahu. It is a community of high-rise condominiums, mid-rise town-dwellings, and houses snaking around the remnants of a now freshwater lake.The U.S. Postal Code for Salt Lake is 96818.

Geography and History

The Salt Lake community is built in the larger and easternmost of three overlapping, low profile, tuff cones or volcanic craters: Makalapa, ?liamanu and ?liapa‘akai. A lake, at one time 1.5 km across (20 ha) but very shallow, formed in the bowl of ?liapa‘akai fed by freshwater springs or possibly seawater seepages (Alexander, 1926 in Maciolek, 1982). Because the lake had no outlet, water loss was largely by evaporation, concentrating salts. Up until 1910, the lake was regularly so salty that salt deposits formed around the shore. In that year, an artesian well was dug to bring the water level higher (and salt content lower) for use as a mullet pond; a tunnel, dug through the southeast rim of the crater, controlled water level and provided an outlet (Macdonald, Abbott, and Peterson. 1983). This act and later construction of a larger drainage outlet, eventually removed the salt from Salt Lake.

An ahupua‘a in ancient Hawai‘i was a parcel of royal land that stretched from the mountain to the sea. The ahupua’a of Moanalua eventually became the property of the Estate of S.M. Damon, a private trust of lands owned by Samuel M. Damon. Before him, these lands belonged to the House of Kamehameha. Damon was involved with the Committee of Safety that succeeded in the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and obtained the abdication of Queen Lili‘uokalani. Damon later became one of the first trustees of the Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate and served alongside philanthropist Charles Reed Bishop. The Estate of S.M. Damon sold a part of the original ahupua’a to commercial and residential developers in 1956. After statehood, the developers took part in an effort led by then Governor of Hawai‘i John A. Burns to establish Honolulu as one of the most modern of the cities in the United States with Salt Lake as one of its highlights.

Roadways

Salt Lake’s growth was mainly attributed to the ease (in those days) with which residents could travel to and from downtown Honolulu and Waik?k?, where a great number of residents worked. Salt Lake’s main street is Salt Lake Boulevard, running the length of the community, from Moanalua High School to Aloha Stadium, connecting Puuloa Road (State Rte. 66) and Kamehameha Highway (State Rte. 99). Its major arteries are Ala Ilima Street, Ala Lilikoi Street and Ala Napunani Street. Most of Salt Lake’s residential streets are named after native flora and fauna. For example, the ‘ilima is the official flower of the City & County of Honolulu.

Highways and freeways passing close by Salt Lake include the Queen Lili’uokalani Freeway (no exits or entrances), Moanalua Freeway (Exit 2 – Ala Napunani; Exit 3 – Puuloa Road), and Nimitz Highway (State Rte. 92). A renovation of Puuloa Road, which divides Salt Lake from M?punapuna, is underway (2004).

Military

Salt Lake is almost surrounded by military installations. Nearby Fort Shafter is the headquarters of the United States Army Pacific. Hickam Air Force Base is headquarters of the United States Pacific Air Forces. Pearl Harbor is headquarters of the United States Pacific Fleet. United States Pacific Command is to the north of Salt Lake at Camp H. M. Smith. Tripler Army Medical Center, visible on the heights to the northeast, is the principal U.S. military medical facility for Asia and the Pacific Basin.

Airport

Although not regarded as part of Salt Lake, the Honolulu International Airport is very close by just to the south. The area surrounding the airport is often referred to as the airport district, a commercial and retail region built up along Nimitz Highway. Located there are office buildings, the main United States Postal Service center in the state, and Ke’ehi Lagoon.

Community

A 2003 special feature of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin classified Salt Lake as affluent upper-middle class with equal distribution of Caucasians and second and third generations of Filipino Americans and Japanese Americans. Korean American families have also been making their presence known most recently. There are under 30,000 people living in Salt Lake. Based on surveys compiled by the University of Hawaii, residents are composed of mostly Honolulu professionals and military officers choosing to live off base. The neighborhood community is home to the families of officers from the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard and Navy.

According to the 2000 report of the United States Census Bureau, Salt Lake ranked eighth of all the neighborhood communities in Hawai‘i in terms of median annual household income. It ranked second in median home values, then $ 875,000. Waik?k? was highest.

Education

Moanalua High School was opened in 1972 to meet the educational needs of the newly developed neighborhood community. Over the years it had gained a reputation for excellence and had been dubbed by the Honolulu Advertiser as the Private School of Public Schools, a moniker that became widely used by Salt Lake residents in reference to their school. The distinction acknowledged the qualities it shared with prestigious institutions like ‘Iolani School and Punahou School. Also serving the neighborhood community are Radford High School, Aliamanu Elementary School and Aliamanu Middle School, formerly known as Aliamanu Intermediate School until 1997. Salt Lake Elementary School hugs the slopes of the Aliamanu crater. There are two schools serving the Roman Catholic Diocese of Honolulu, Holy Family Catholic Academy and the Saint Philomena Early Learning Center at Saint Philomena Church.

Commercial Center

The commercial center of the Salt Lake neighborhood community is Salt Lake Shopping Center, bound by Ala Ilima Street, Ala Lilikoi Street and Salt Lake Boulevard. A community mall, its anchor tenants are a Safeway grocery store, a Longs Drugs store and the only McDonald’s in the region. Some popular Hawai‘i eateries are at Salt Lake Shopping Center including Soon’s, an acclaimed Korean barbecue place and Loong Hwa, a Chinese restaurant. In the 1980s, Mayor of Honolulu Frank Fasi established a mobile satellite city hall at Salt Lake Shopping Center to provide city services for residents without having to travel into City Hall. Salt Lake Shopping Center at one time was home to the Salt Lake Moanalua Public Library until it moved to its own facilities on the campus of Aliamanu Elementary and Middle Schools.

Parks

Salt Lake is considered a green neighborhood community, endowed with large stretches of park lands. The largest of the parks is Salt Lake District Park renovated as recently as 2003. It is so large that the park was divided into two regions, mauka and makai. The park is home to various hiking trails that snake around the slopes of ?liamanu and ?liapa‘akai craters and features the remnants of the lake that once dominated the area. Salt Lake District Park has playing fields, basketball and tennis courts. There are multipurpose buildings and a gymnasium operated by the City & County of Honolulu. A 50-meter swimming pool is the newest addition.

Smaller parks dot the Salt Lake landscape, green oases in the midst of high-rise condominiums. Salt Lake Municipal Park and its parking lot is the site of a People’s Market each Saturday morning. Established by former Mayor Frank Fasi, the People’s Market allows Salt Lake residents to purchase fresh produce and fish from independent local producers. Hoa Aloha Park on Ala Ilima Street is the site of weekend soccer games and is a late afternoon hang-out for students coming out of school.

Community events

Salt Lake is home to various public annual events:

• Menehune Classic is held in the fall, opening the competitive marching band season. One of the most important music festivals in Honolulu, various high school marching bands perform at the Moanalua High School football field showing off skill and precision. Moanalua High School is home to one of the preeminent marching bands in the state, having performed throughout the world.
• Winter Craft Fair is held each December as entrepreneurs gather on the campus of Moanalua High School to sell their unique goods and fresh, hot food. A similar craft fair is held each spring.

External links

• Aliamanu Elementary School
• Aliamanu Middle School
• Holy Family Catholic Academy
• Moanalua High School
• Salt Lake Elementary School
• Salt Lake Watershed
• “The Real Salt Lake”, HONOLULU Magazine ~ November 2006

Now that I have moved to Berlin, I get to hear VOA and NPR Worldwide and the European version of BBC Worldwide and I am pretty excited. I can finally hear US propaganda “outside the border” which is fascinating. As part of NPR Worldwide’s broadcast this AM (104.1 FM), I got to hear a show this morning about the history of Public Diplomacy, which I found amazingly interesting. From 1914, I think they said, the US has had a real desire to educate and engage the world, which ended abruptly once we won the cold war. And then it all went to pot, especially since the responsibility of Public Diplomacy has been rolled into the US Department of State. Well, I am all for Public Diplomacy as a strategy that is much more effective than either PR or a propaganda war. One of the most useful past strategies, which is being gutted because of post 9-11 paranoia, was the global encouragement of students to study in the USA. One lad from Egypt spoke of his experience in Washington State at the University of Washington, saying, “I got to experience that most Americans live the American Dream on two parents working two jobs, which is something I would never have known from my experience of the USA from TV from Cairo.” Amazingly interesting. Here’s some more info on Public Dimplomacy via Wikipedia via Memes.org

In international relations, the term public diplomacy is a term coined in the 1960s to describe aspects of international diplomacy other than the interactions between national governments. It has been closely associated with the United States Information Agency, which used the term to define its mission. It was originally a euphemism for purportedly truthful propaganda.

Standard diplomacy might be described as the ways in which government leaders communicate with each other at the highest levels, the elite diplomacy we are all familiar with. Public diplomacy, by contrast – according to the definition at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy – focuses on the ways in which a country (or multi-lateral organization such as the United Nations) communicates with citizens in other societies. A country may be acting deliberately or inadvertently, and through both official and private individuals and institutions. Effective public diplomacy starts from the premise that dialogue, rather than a sales pitch, is often central to achieving the goals of foreign policy: public diplomacy must be seen as a two-way street.

Film, television, music, sports, video games and other social/cultural activities are seen by public diplomacy advocates as enormously important avenues for otherwise diverse citizens to understand each other and integral to the international cultural understanding, which they state is a key goal of modern public diplomacy strategy. It involves not only shaping the message(s) that a country wishes to present abroad, but also analyzing and understanding the ways that the message is interpreted by diverse societies and developing the tools of listening and conversation as well as the tools of persuasion.

One of the most successful initiatives which embodies the principles of effective public diplomacy is the creation by international treaty in the 1950s of the European Coal and Steel Community which later became the European Union. Its original purpose after World War II was to tie the economies of Europe together so much that war would be impossible. Supporters of European integration see it as having achieved both this goal and the extra benefit of catalysing greater international understanding as European countries did more business together and the ties among member states’ citizens increased. Opponents of European integration are leery of a loss of national sovereignty and greater centralization of power.

Public diplomacy as beyond propaganda

After the dissolution of the USIA in 1999, the term has continued to be used within the US government, especially the US Department of State. It has been used most often as the foreign policy equivalent of the term public relations, but embodies a much broader frame than this.

Aside from the use of media like the Voice of America, it also includes other kinds of interaction with the public in other countries. Arranging student exchange programs, hosting seminars, and meeting with foreign business and academic leaders are all considered public diplomacy. Indirect public diplomacy includes the everyday activities of citizens internationally, such as everyday cultural activities and products such as films, tourism, theatre, and internet discussion.

The term public diplomacy clearly originated as a euphemism for propaganda. However, this definition is a somewhat dated definition, as more sensitive practitioners embody an intercultural, ‘learning’ approach to public diplomacy, with an emphasis on dialogue rather than propaganda.

A history of the term “public diplomacy”

Nicholas J. Cull of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, wrote in his essay “‘Public Diplomacy’ Before Gullion: The Evolution of a Phrase:

The earliest use of the phrase “public diplomacy” to surface is actually not American at all but in a leader piece from The Times in January 1856. It is used merely as a synonym for civility in a piece criticizing the posturing of President Franklin Pierce.

According to publicdiplomacy.org, a website sponsored by the USIA Alumni Association,

The term public diplomacy was first used in 1965 by Edmund Gullion, a career diplomat, in connection with the foundation of the Edward R. Murrow Center at Tufts University‘s The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

The Murrow Center brochure described public diplomacy as:

the influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policies. It encompasses dimensions of international relations beyond traditional diplomacy . . . [including] the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries; the interaction of private groups and interests in one country with those of another . . . (and) the transnational flow of information and ideas.

While Gullion and the Murrow Center were the first to use the term public diplomacy, their definition remains contested and controversial. Today, there is no one definition of public diplomacy, there are many definitions (links to other definitions).

The dictionary definition of the word propaganda is “The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.” Notice that the definition says nothing about whether the material is or is not true; the essence of propaganda is that it is distributed with the intention of supporting a cause. The word literally means “that which ought to be propagated” and originated in the Catholic Church to describe the church agency responsible for evangelising. See the article on propaganda for more detail.

In the United States, however, the word “propaganda” carried and carries the connotation of falsehood. The USIA has always maintained that its agencies, such as the Voice of America, are truthful. In a famous remark, Edward R. Murrow, then director of the USIA, said:

Truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.

Nevertheless the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 still prevents the distribution within the United States of official American information which was intended for foreign audiences, for example exempting Voice of America from releasing transcripts in response to FOIA requests.

Broadly speaking, then, until recent times, the term public diplomacy has traditionally been used by those supporting it to mean truthful propaganda. But critics, such as the editors of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, have viewed it in more nefarious terms, as a form of “covert propaganda.” They also report that “the bipartisan report of the Congressional Iran-Contra committees (November 1987, p. 34) found that ‘[i]n fact, “public diplomacy” turned out to mean public relations-lobbying, all at taxpayers’ expense.’”

See also

• Diplomacy Monitor, a tool for tracking Internet-based public diplomacy

References

• Fallows, James (2005) “Success without Victory,” The Atlantic Monthly, 295:1 p. 80 (Evera quotation)

Other relevant articles

• “A Clash of Professional Cultures:The David Kelly Affair” by Biljana Scott (Published in Hannah Slavik (ed.) Intercultural Communication and Diplomacy, DiploFoundation, 2004.)Also see conference slideshow presentation

• “Multiculturalism for the masses: social advertising and public diplomacy post 9/11″ by Biljana Scott (Published in Hannah Slavik (ed.) Intercultural Communication and Diplomacy, DiploFoundation, 2004.)

• “Public Diplomacy” by Pamela H. Smith, Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs, U.S. Embassy, London (Published in “Modern Diplomacy”)

• “Multistakeholder Public Diplomacy of Small and Medium-Sized States: Norway and Canada Compared” by Jozef Bátora (Paper presented to the International Conference on Multistakeholder Diplomacy,Malta, February 11-13, 2005)

External links

• How the World Sees America – Amar Bakshi on Washington Post/Newsweek on Public Diplomacy
• Example of term being used by President George W. Bush in relation to the Middle East – January 19, 2005 The Age
• Public Diplomacy Wiki maintained by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy
• Public Diplomacy (USIAAA)
• Journal of Place Branding and Public Diplomacy
• The Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy at The Fletcher School
• Public Diplomacy Research Network

You know I have been rubbing shoulders with Hollywood producer Leonid Rozhetskin. Well, it looks like Leonid Rozhetskin and L+E Productions does a fine job of selecting scripts and projects because I got some breaking news: the Sundance Film Festival selected L+E Productions’ Hamlet II in its premiers category.

“The Sundance Film Festival nomination of Hamlet II is not up on the Sundance website, but here’s some information about the Premiers Category: To showcase the diversity of contemporary cinema, the Sundance Film Festival’s Premieres program offers a selection of the latest work from established directors and world premieres of highly anticipated films. This is not a competitive category. It’s L+E Production‘s first Sundance selection.” (More about Hamlet II)

I just finished watching a 2004 episode of John McLaughlin’s “One on One” and had by doors blown off by Amy Chua, author of World on Fire, a three-year-old book that is more relevant now than ever before. I agree with every word.

Amy Chua
John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law
Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She came to Yale in 2001 after teaching at Duke and serving as a visiting professor at Columbia, Stanford, and NYU. Her expertise is in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. She recently published the book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. Professor Chua has an A.B. and a J.D. from Harvard University.

Education
J.D., Harvard, 1987
A.B., Harvard, 1984

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN’S “ONE ON ONE”
GUEST: AMY CHUA, AUTHOR AND LAW PROFESSOR
SUBJECT: DEMOCRACY AND INTERNATIONAL STABILITY
BROADCAST: WEEKEND OF MAY 22-23, 2004

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Exporting chaos. Spreading democracy is the Bush administration’s answer to the perplexing problem of how to stabilize the Middle East. But what if democracy actually promotes instability under some conditions? From Indonesia to Zimbabwe to Bolivia, this author claims that democracy creates violent ethnic conflict. Iraq, she warns, is next. Is democracy our most lethal export? We’ll ask Yale Law School professor and noted author Amy Chua.

Professor Chua, welcome.

MS. CHUA: Thank you.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: In the introduction there was mention that the Bush administration feels that the best way to stabilize Iraq and that part of the world is through democracy. Do you believe that to be the case?

MS. CHUA: Well, ultimately I am in favor of democracy as sort of the best long-term optimal solution. But as we’re learning sort of the hard way, developing non-Western countries have ethnic, religious and social structures completely different from what we are familiar with here in the United States.

And in fact, in many — you know, most Americans tend to assume that markets and democracy kind of naturally go together, just reinforce each other. And that makes perfect sense if you look at our own country today. But in fact in many non-Western countries democratization can lead to not the kinds of results that we expect and sometimes can result in anti-market, anti-American results.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We can get back to Iraq in a moment. But of those Western countries, would you think, for example, of Venezuela or Bolivia as instances where democracy has caused more problems than it actually relieved?

MS. CHUA: Yes. I would wouldn’t say that — I wouldn’t blame democracy. I think it’s an important point. It’s not democracy’s fault. But in both those countries, you had historically a situation where a tiny minority, basically a light-skinned, sort of Europeanized cosmopolitan elite –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Particularly Venezuela?

MS. CHUA: — particularly — well, in Venezuela — actually, just as much in Bolivia, really. The elite is very Europeanized, foreign-educated, elegant.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Why are they dominant?

MS. CHUA: There are many different reasons that these certain ethnic minorities come to dominate different countries.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Let’s speak about Venezuela specifically.

MS. CHUA: In that case, I think it’s really colonization. I think it’s — you know, the Spanish colonizers came over early on and basically, you know, took all the land. I don’t even think it was entrepreneurialism necessarily. Now that’s being a little bit unfair because there were subsequent waves of immigration. So you did have lots of, you know, small pools of immigration come in, and they were very entrepreneurial.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: How is the one class differentiated from the other? Is one called pardos?

MS. CHUA: No, not exactly. In Venezuela, it’s not — the ethnicity isn’t so stark. That is, from — it’s — from the point of view of an American, North America, somebody in the United States, if you go and see Venezuela, it strikes us that the elite, the wealthy seem white; that is, light hair, green eyes. But in the consciousness of the Venezuelans, they don’t think of race in the same way, and lots of people will say we’re all Venezuelans. But so it’s not as stark as black and white, you know, in this country.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Chavez was elected in a free election?

MS. CHUA: Yes. Chavez came to power. He’s a very good example of a democratically elected anti-market leader; that is — he — how did he get to power? Not by proposing sound economic policies, but really by scapegoating both the United States and these oligarchs internally, and the masses voted for him.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So democracy brought us Chavez, and that is the problem?

MS. CHUA: That’s not the sole problem, but given the conditions that existed in Venezuela, yes. My point is that when you have overnight elections in countries with enormous poverty and a huge amount of frustration and wealth concentrated in the hands of a very, very small minority, democracy often brings to power leaders who may not be pro-market and, you know, observing the rule of law, and Chavez is a good example of that. He — it’s not entirely his fault, although I don’t think much of him at all. I mean, he’s a terrible president. The economy is tanking. But you also have to look at the underlying forces that led to the people voting for him, and I think that was — you know, he was able to capitalize on a huge amount of frustration and exclusion among the local population.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What about Bolivia?

MS. CHUA: Bolivia’s even a better example for the kinds of problems I’m interested in. There it’s different from Venezuela because the ethnic lines are more stark.

In Bolivia, like Ecuador and Peru, you have a country where almost a majority of the population are Amerindians, that is indigenous, principally Aymaran or Quechua Indians. And this majority, or near majority of indigenous peoples are extremely poor. They’ve been fatalistic — described as fatalistic for years. Many are extremely poorly educated, even illiterate. And then the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very small, maybe 7 percent, you could call “white” — I mean, they would look white to people from the United States — a white elite that has very good connections to the British and United States foreign investors.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Who was elected president there?

MS. CHUA: Well, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was the president there for many years, until last fall when he had to flee by helicopter. And Conzalo Sanchez de Lozada was a white president. They actually all him “El Gringo.” He actually spent much of his life exiled in Connecticut, and speaks Spanish with an English accent.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What happened?

MS. CHUA: He was a pro-U.S., pro-free trade, pro-foreign investment, pro-IMF president and, you know, put in a lot of pro- market policies, including the privatization of water, which just led to an explosion of frustration and anger among the majority, who are so poor to begin with, and suddenly realized, you know, that with free-market policies they now had to pay for water and couldn’t afford it.

So in the fall, there were a series of very, very popularly supported, probably majority supported, I guess you could call it democratically produced Indian movements, populist movements, that led to escalating violence. And ultimately, President de Lozada had to flee for his life by helicopter.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Was the president an honorable man?

MS. CHUA: I think he was quite a good president in many ways; short-sighted in some ways, but I don’t think he was, you know, unusually corrupt. I think he had some sound free-market policies to propose.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But there was unleashed pent-up anti-his-class sentiment; correct?

MS. CHUA: Very much. And it was very explicitly –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Was it demagogued?

MS. CHUA: I think it was demagogue-fueled, although again, there was some — you have to realize, why do people go for these demagogues, what is these demagogues’ appeal?

Now, what’s interesting is that this is part of globalization. I mean, I had a student from Bolivia, about five years ago, who said we could never have an ethnic majority movement in our country, you know, it could be a class warfare, but we wouldn’t have an Indian-based kind of ethnic movement. And he wrote me an e-mail just a few years ago and said it’s changing; I take it back.

And this is part of — you know, one thing that globalization spreads that we don’t really focus on, which is it’s the spread of identity politics, ethnic demagogue –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are you anti-globalist?

MS. CHUA: No. No. I’m — I see myself–

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are you anti-free market?

MS. CHUA: No. I’m a pro-globalization, a very much pro-market person.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are you anti-democracy?

MS. CHUA: Actually no, I’m not. I’m not in that camp. I’m very concerned — my point is that there are many different versions of free-market democracy, and I think that we have been exporting the wrong version, a caricature, really.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Well, what would you have favored in Bolivia? What would you have favored?

MS. CHUA: Much — I would have favored — first of all, on the market side, you know what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years, since 1989? There’s no Western nation today that has anything close to a laissez-faire system, right? We have taxation –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: You mean a primitive form of capitalism?

MS. CHUA: Yeah, we don’t — we have progressive taxation, unemployment — we have –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We have regulated democracy.

MS. CHUA: Yeah, anti-fraud laws, anti-insider trading laws.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So are you saying that — going back to Iraq — the imposition of democracy in Iraq would be a one-man one-vote and it might unleash the Sunnis against the Shi’ites and that it is unregulated, unsophisticated and this has to be a more gradual process?

MS. CHUA: In many ways, it’s not necessarily a timing process. But yes — so on the market side, we’ve been exporting a primitive sort of version of raw capitalism with no mechanism –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And laissez-fairism.

MS. CHUA: Yeah, and no mechanisms for regulating fraud and monopolies or redistributing wealth.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Did it take time for the United States to bring those mechanisms into existence?

MS. CHUA: Absolutely. We are not exporting the same kind of capitalism that we have now and it’s exactly the same with democracy. If you recall, our founding fathers — that is James Madison, many people who signed our Constitution — they were all terrified of overnight universal suffrage. They didn’t want the poor to be allowed to vote because they thought it would lead to chaos and, you know, the poor confiscating from the rich.

And in fact, what we’ve been exporting since 1989 is basically a really oversimplistic form of democracy — essentially, overnight elections with overnight universal suffrage at the national level. And I think that’s not what democracy is all about.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is there criticism to go around? For example, aren’t you also critical of the IMF and the World Bank for doing the same thing?

MS. CHUA: Yes, on the market side, for sure.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But they’re not as insistent as we are on the implementation of a primitive form of capitalism, are they? Don’t they allow — don’t they have time frames that permit the introduction of regulatory mechanisms to control the growth of capitalists and markets?

MS. CHUA: I think not. I think this is revisionist history. I think things are changing slightly now, with all the –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’re talking IMF and World Bank.

MS. CHUA: Yeah, but actually, in the late ’80s and ’90s, the United States and IMF and the World Bank shared very similar positions, and this makes sense to me. I mean, I’m critical, but I understand it. Look, after the Berlin Wall fell, you had the death of communism and everybody looked around and said, okay, we don’t want communism and we don’t like dictatorships, so the only thing left are markets and democracy. Let’s put these things in as fast as we can, and my point is that it’s just not that easy. You can’t plug in free-market democracy like a light bulb. But the IMF for sure in the ’80s and ’90s, their structural adjustment policies, their policies for Africa, the poorest countries of Southeast Asia was get rid of subsidies. It was a raw form of capitalism, nothing about redistributing wealth. It was, you know, let’s privatize everything; let’s let in foreign investment; remove the subsidies, resulting in unemployment; prices would go up.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But you don’t — for example, Zimbabwe is in such terrible shape because of Robert Mugabe. Do you see your view, your model, operating in Zimbabwe?

MS. CHUA: Perfectly. My view is that there are numerous non- Western countries around the world that have what I call a market- dominant minority. We don’t have this in the United States. There are countries where a very small outsider ethnic minority controls huge amounts of the nation’s wealth.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Indonesia’s a perfect example –

MS. CHUA: Chinese.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: — where you have the Chinese.

MS. CHUA: Three percent of the population controlling 70 percent of the private economy.

But Zimbabwe’s a perfect example, too. For many, many years, really for decades, the white majority (sic) — just about 1 percent of the population — controlled 70 percent of the country’s best arable land in the form of very productive, very efficient commercial plantations. And you had, you know, poor, poor masses of black majority under apartheid.

Now what people like to forget — I mean, it’s easy to point the finger at Mugabe now, and I would be among those — he’s just a terrible disaster — but it’s important to remember that Mugabe himself is a product of democracy. He was elected in 1980 in very closely monitored free and fair elections. How did he come to power? What was his campaign slogan?

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So he was democratically elected?

MS. CHUA: But do you know how he came to power? He campaigned — his campaign slogan was we need to take back the stolen land from the whites, and that’s why the black majority voted for him. He was as popular as Nelson Mandela under that platform. But he didn’t redistribute that land in the ensuing 20 years because of pressures — partly because of pressures from the IMF, the British government, the World Bank and the United States in foreign investment, and partly because of his own partly corrupt practice. He did not redistribute that land, and that’s why there was all this pent-up hostility among the majority. And every time elections came around, Robert Mugabe tried to play the race card by scapegoating the whites.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: All right. Well, how do you explain the situation in South Africa, where none of this has occurred? Although you think you see signs of what’s happening in Zimbabwe there, namely the unleashing of a pent-up, anti-white sentiment which was held in check perhaps because of that forgiveness amnesty program.

MS. CHUA: South Africa –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you see something happening in South Africa similar to Zimbabwe?

MS. CHUA: I think South Africa has two very, very positive things going for it. One is the presence of Nelson Mandela, who from the beginning amazingly has never played the ethnic or racial card. He’s always been inclusive, and that’s a gift. The second thing that South Africa has going for it is neighboring Zimbabwe. Everybody in that country looks over at Zimbabwe and says, you know, we don’t want to go that way. So President Mbeki has something going for him. He basically — they also — this is a country where a tiny white majority (sic) still controls, I would say, 70 percent of the country’s best arable land. And until they –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But they have a constitution and they’re protected in their rights. The minority is protected, correct?

MS. CHUA: Well, it’s not so simple as that. With democracy –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is there some give on that now taking place?

MS. CHUA: Very much so. The new black economic empowerment policy, which of course is majority-supported, is basically sort of like an affirmative action program for the majority. So it’s not affirmative action for the minority –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: You mean they’re going to cut back on De Beers wines’ (sic) freedom of operation and maybe on some of its holdings?

MS. CHUA: Actually, yes. There was something called the Mining Nationalization Act that was just passed, and at first it was terrifying to the Oppenheimers and the whites. It called for something like 50 percent black ownership. But they negotiated that down, and now it’s a situation where, you know, the white minority, including the Oppenheimers and De Beers, are going to relinquish some of that — that is, bring in more black participation — and hopefully they are walking that line. I mean, they are trying to keep in markets, not scare away foreign investment, but also try to give the black majority more of a stake in markets.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So the United States is promoting, in Iraq and elsewhere, a caricature of democracy and market economics. I’ll put this in another way. We are using our dominant world position economically and militarily to dictate political structures to other countries that are inappropriate to their cultural and historical circumstances, and if it comes about as a consequence of our pressure, what will happen is a worse set of realities than would otherwise exist. For example, Sunnis and Shi’as, you believe, could be at each other’s throats.

MS. CHUA: Oh –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And motivation is not doctrinal; it’s commerce, and it’s material. Correct?

MS. CHUA: Not always. No, it’s not entirely material. And I wouldn’t quite have put it that way. I mean, I’m not a conspiracy theory person. I often think that — I think that in many ways the U.S. government has been driven by idealism as much as other factors.

But that’s exactly right. I think what you’re seeing in the administration now is they very idealistically, in some ways, said, “We’re going to put in democracy in Iraq” –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Have you heard of Robert Kaplan?

MS. CHUA: Yes. Sure –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Robert Kaplan, I think, holds the view that a benign autocracy is probably the best thing in some of these countries for a period of time.

MS. CHUA: Yes –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you agree with that?

MS. CHUA: No, I actually don’t.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you want — well, don’t you fight your own doctrine there –

MS. CHUA: No, I don’t.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: — if you want an election now?

MS. CHUA: No. I respect his position very much, but the reason that I’m not in the anti-democracy camp is for the simple reason –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Well, he’s not in that camp, either, really –

MS. CHUA: No, he is in favor of just holding off on democracy and maybe trying to find a beneficent dictator –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Right.

MS. CHUA: — or at least having an autocratic system that, you know, might be liberal.

Now I understand why. You can get lucky. Look at Lee Quan Yew in Singapore.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Yes.

MS. CHUA: Perfect example for Robert Kaplan. And he’s right.

My problem — the reason I struggle with that position is because how can you ever ensure that you’re going to get a beneficent dictator?

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’ll be right back.

(Announcements.)

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is it arrogance or is it ignorance that makes America think that we can safely export our version of democracy to the rest of the world? We’ll put that question to our guest, but first, here is her distinguished profile.

Born: Champaign, Illinois. Forty-one years of age; husband Jed, two daughters. Reared Catholic. Politics: Independent.

Harvard University, B.A. Economics, Magna Cum Laude; Harvard University, Doctor of Laws, Cum Laude.

Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton, an international Wall Street law firm, where she represented, among other clients, Mexico in the privatization of its international telephone company, Telmex; four years.

Duke University, professor of law, seven years. Yale University, professor of law, three years and currently.

Author, a book, “World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability,” a best-seller now in paperback.

Hobbies: tennis, violin, piano.

Amy Lynn Chua.

Amy Lynn Chua, do you want to add to any of your biography? You were reared Catholic. That sounds like you are no longer Catholic?

MS. CHUA: Well, my husband is Jewish and my father was in a Protestant family and my mother’s parents were Buddhist. So I come from a very diverse background.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: How did you work that out with your husband, in the practical order? The religion question.

MS. CHUA: It was complicated. My children speak Chinese but they’re raised Jewish.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What was that?

MS. CHUA: My children are fluent in Chinese but they are raised Jewish.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Was that a deal?

MS. CHUA: Yes. (Chuckles.)

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And it’s working?

MS. CHUA: Appears to be.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What do you think of — to get back to Iraq, because we don’t have much time — what do you think is going to happen if we try to impose democracy here?

MS. CHUA: It’s a real disaster, actually, if you just look at the demographics. And it seems that anybody who had thought about this beforehand would have seen this. You have a 60 or 70 percent Shi’ite majority; that’s a fact. And this is why the U.S. government cancelled the elections in Najaf last June. They realized, look, if we hold free and fair elections, this could go fundamentalist, and that’s why they cancelled the elections. And then there was this popular outcry, everybody was outraged; and then the U.S. government said, ok, no, we are going to put in elections.

But in fact, what the U.S. administration wants is democracy without majority rule, and that is pretty hard to do — impossible in fact. You have the demographics where the Sunni — in fact, the Ba’athist party tends to be the ones, this minority — again, they’re –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you think we should just have an early departure and let them decide what sort of government they want and let them work it out? To what extent should we be intrusive in the process at this difficult time?

MS. CHUA: Well, we already were intrusive. So I think that it’s a — there is a question of responsibility at this point because –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: For them in the selection of their government?

MS. CHUA: No, but to make sure that we don’t leave just utter chaos. One of the ideas that I’m toying around with is — really, I think that the way to go in Iraq is to be promoting local democracy first.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are we talking about Kurds and Shi’as and Sunnis?

MS. CHUA: Everywhere. You know, in the United States or the U.K., our democracies started locally. It wasn’t imposed at the national level all of a sudden. So instead of — I think you shouldn’t — instead of having national elections where everybody is fighting over the oil, and you’ve got a 70 percent Shi’ite majority that is long-oppressed, long-humiliated — they feel it’s their time to take back the country. I think that the better way to go would be to start locally with cities, towns, villages. You know, local democracy is the best instruction for national democracy.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is this a Bosnia model?

MS. CHUA: No. I’m not in favor of breaking up the country. I mean, I don’t think that would work. But the idea is that, you know, you need to learn how democracy works and to have other things that you –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And you think that should be a gradual process and it should be done on a sectoral basis.

MS. CHUA: I also think that if certain villages or certain towns go fundamentalist, we have to let that stand. We can’t just remove it and step in and intervene if we don’t like that result. But I think we need to secure other regions so that people can move with their feet and ultimately, you know, let democracy really play out.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’ll be right back.

(Announcements.)

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Professor Chua, thank you for being my guest.

MS. CHUA: Thank you for having me.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: I have never read a book as complicated and as high-concept as your book that is so easy to read.

MS. CHUA: Thank you very much.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: I really must commend you on it.

MS. CHUA: I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And I hope you will come back.

MS. CHUA: It would be my pleasure.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is there a final thought that you would give to the White House and the Congress?

MS. CHUA: I think it would help if we knew a little bit more about the countries that we’re supposedly trying to help. I think that would be a good first step. And to understand that you can’t just, you know, put in markets and democracy overnight. Our process took a long time. And we need to put a lot more thought into that.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Thanks so much.

MS. CHUA: Thank you.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Good luck.

MS. CHUA: Thanks very much.

END OF REGULAR SEGMENT

PBS SEGMENT

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Amy Chua, talk to me about, if you would, talk to us about Russia.

MS. CHUA: Well, Russia is another country where, in the ’90s, in the sort of anarchic transition to capitalism, there were no laws. It was just a vacuum. And in this rapid transition from socialism to capitalism, basically seven men came to control about 50 percent of Russia’s massive natural resource wealth.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: The oligarchs.

MS. CHUA: The oligarchs. And out of seven of them, six of them were well known to be Jewish. And this fact was not lost on the Russian population. And so you had this situation where markets produced this — or sort of un — primitive markets led to this enormous concentration of wealth. This produced tremendous resentment among the Russian people, who felt like they were just ripped off. They didn’t have anything.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Were they also feeding off the classic anti- Semitism that exists?

MS. CHUA: Yes, which has been in Russia for, you know, just hundreds of years. But yes, this actually produced — when you democratized there, it produced anti-Semitic political parties that explicitly called for expulsion of the Jews and taking back their assets. And so that’s partly the model. When you have markets with this kind of market-dominant minority, rapid democracy can give rise to ethnic scapegoating.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Well, do you think you really have here a dominant ethnic minority in the six who happened to be Jewish?

MORE

MS. CHUA: Well, it was certainly perceived as such. That’s the point. Ethnicity is not a science; it’s how people perceive it. And in this country Jews may not be an ethnic minority, but there –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, but also in Indonesia, when Suharto passed on that unleashed the killing of the Chinese, who owned 3 percent of the wealth over there.

MS. CHUA: Exactly, exactly. In –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But there was nothing like that in Russia.

MS. CHUA: No –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What you have now is Chechnya. You had a warlike situation for a while between Georgia and Azerbaijan.

MS. CHUA: Yes.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: But that’s it. Otherwise everything is under control, remarkably enough, would you not say?

MS. CHUA: Remarkably. I think’s it’s under Putin. Putin is maybe a democratic leader in theory, but he has decidedly autocratic tendencies and he is keeping everything under his control right now. And in fact, specifically he’s targeted three of those Jewish oligarchs.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So he’s the benign autocrat?

MS. CHUA: At the moment, he’s viewing very much in that direction, cracking down on –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Talk to me about anti-Americanism around the world.

MS. CHUA: Well, most of my research focuses on the very small ethnic minorities in countries like Indonesia or the Indians in East Africa, Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, whites –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you think –

MS. CHUA: At the global level — I’m sorry?

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, go — I want to get this point in because we’re running out of time. In 50 years — 2050, 45 years from now, you’ll live to see it, whites are going to be in the minority –

MS. CHUA: In the United States.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: — in this country. Is there a problem with the whites assuming that status of a dominant minority, and could there be a rising up of the non-whites in this country — the Hispanics and the blacks — to do what happened in Indonesia, or is that just — is that just so far afield?

MS. CHUA: I think would be very –

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What?

MS. CHUA: I think it would be very hard in this country to organize a movement that describes the whites in this country as outsiders, coming in to steal the wealth of the nation. That just doesn’t fit with our history if you look at our own history.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Even though they may be — they will be — in 45 years or so they will be in the minority?

MS. CHUA: It’s possible. I’ve discussed that; you know, the browning of America, and will — you know, will whites eventually reach that point. But the countries I look at, these ethnic minorities are viewed as outsiders, and I think it’s hard to view whites as outsiders.

Now at the global level, the United States has become, I think, a sort of global market-dominant minority. We’re perceived by the world — we’re just 4 percent of the world’s population, but we’re perceived everywhere as the principal engine and principal beneficiary of global (commerce ?) right now.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So we are minorities worldwide?

MS. CHUA: Yes, and in part as a result of that we are also the object of mass, often demagogue-fueled resentment and hatred, you know, of the same kind, that’s directed at so many other of these market-dominant minorities around the world.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And that accounts for widespread –

MS. CHUA: Partly. Not all. There are a lot of other things that we’ve done wrong to contribute to anti-Americanism. But certainly I think that’s part of the picture, the fact that we’re the world’s hyperpower. You know, we’re going to be held to a higher standard than everybody else.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What happens when China becomes a hyperpower?

MS. CHUA: That will be interesting if that happens. It will be interesting to see what happens.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What will happen to us then?

MS. CHUA: Well, it will be interesting to see. It will be interesting to see how our policies change.

“According to Harry B. Soria, the celebration of May 1 as Lei Day was invented in 1927 by island artist, writer Donald Benson Blanding and Grace Tower Warren. Don Blanding is also credited with the invention of the custom of tossing your lei overboard when you sailed from Honolulu. If the lei came back to shore (and most did) it supposedly meant you would return.” Via Square 1

This is true, this is what is was like as a little kid in Hawaii, living in Salt Lake and attending Aliamanu Elementary School. We did our thing out in the field. The following is a nostalgic remembrance from the Hula Pages.

“For those blessed with a childhood in Hawai`i, there was no finer or more festive day of Hawaiian celebration. For this Aunty’s home village in Puna on the Big Island, The May Day Pageant, held at the school, was a far bigger event than the Christmas Program, which came in second, a distant second. May Day was not, and still is not, an official Hawaiian holiday, but villagers took off work anyway, whether they had kids in school or not. It was a day that drew us together like a powerful magnet. We came together as a community in celebration and remembrance of our cultural heritage and diversity.

This page was created for all who find their way here, but especially written for those who must be away from the `âina (literally, the land; figuratively, Hawai`i). As your own unique memories flow through your consciousness , may the vivid remembrance of the sights, sounds, fragrances and The Aloha Spirit of this special day permeate your every sense:

Remember the excitement and giddy anticipation leading up to May Day? The hours of dance practice, coaxing awkward hands and clumsy feet into graceful movements… preparing the costumes… gently picking flowers and stringing them into lei to express Aloha to loved ones, physically here and departed, kumu (teachers) and for the all-important May Day performance by each class…

Remember going to school decked out in lei, wearing brightly-colored mu`umu`u and Aloha shirts? Kids “oohing-and-ahhing” over each other’s delectable lei of candy, packs of chewing gum and cracked seed, individually wrapped in colored cellophane tied together with curly ribbon… lei being pulled apart and treats being exchanged and consumed, spinning each kid out to lofty sugar highs… presenting lei to kumu with sticky hands and even stickier kisses, and soon the top of kumu’s head was barely seen above the crush of lei…

Remember wriggling into dance costumes and the last-minute rehearsals and jitters? A bit of nail-biting, some hand-holding, and a whole lot of fidgeting… the entire community coming together for the May Day school pageant, lei contest, games and food… waving to all the smiling Aunties and Uncles, as you filed in with your class…

Remember that standing-room-only crowd, but there was no rudeness, no unruliness, no jostling, just smiles and kû ka paila (heaps of) Aloha Spirit… squeezing closer and tighter to fit one more Aunty’s `elemu (buttocks), or gladly giving up a coveted seat for a tûtû (grandparent) or mama with bêbê (baby)… EVERY person donning their best Hawaiian finery: mu`umu`u or Aloha shirt, lauhala hats (plaited hats of the hala leaves) encircled with lei hulu (feather lei), Hawaiian bracelets, flowers, be it a single pua melia over the ear or a hugely elaborate floral arrangement in the hair, and lei, lei, lei… “garlands of flowers everywhere…”

Remember the intermingled a`ala (fragrances) of pua melia (plumeria), ginger blossoms, gardenia, maile? Ambrosia for the ihu (nose).

Remember the strumming of `ukulele and guitars and the falsetto singing revving up the bustling crowd… then, the pû (conch shell) blower came running down the aisle, pausing to trumpet the festivities to come… an instant hush would come over the crowd… and necks would crane to get the first peek of the May Day mô`î wahine (queen) and mô`î kâne (king) and their court… first, the princesses, resplendent in holokû (formal Hawaiian dresses) and knee-length lei of the islands they represent and the princes in their malo (loincloths) and `ahu (capes), carrying kâhili (standards) marched in…

Remember feeling the lump-in-the-throat pride — and for our tûtû, the wistful nostalgia of times past– when the beautiful May Day mô`î wahine and the handsome mô`î kâne, who, representing the dignity, beauty and goodness of our people and culture, stepped forward? A thousand admiring glances, the population of this Aunty’s village in the 1950′s, kept pace with every regal step taken down the aisle and up to their flower-bedecked thrones…

And remember the hula? Ahh, the HULA…”

I just posted my latest-and-greatest resume onto Craig’s List: San Francisco, Washington, DC, Seattle, and New York City

Social Media, New Media, Web2.0 Strategy, and New Marketing Expert

Interested in remote projects and contracts. Also interested in Washington-area on-site consulting and contract opportunities

MISSION
My passion is to use my experience and expertise in online community outreach and advocacy to promote and protect client online brands using my years of blogging, SEO, PR, marketing, and CGM professional experience.

PROFILE
I am an expert in online outreach, advocacy and marketing with over 10 years of online experience. My experience focuses on web strategy, including SEO strategy, technology strategy, and online marketing strategy. My skills include:

- Blogger: online outreach, advocacy, conversation, and messaging, blogger relations
- Technologist: expertise in community technologies, blogs, wikis, message boards
- Salesman: entrepreneurial nature with a very strong business network and web of personal relationships
- Marketer: Over three years of online buzz marketing, online buzz marketing, and online word-of-mouth marketing
- Producer: experience in designing and developing hardware and software solutions
- Strategist: design, develop, and implement web strategies and marketing plans to reach online consumers
- Promoter: online brand promotion, virals, organic SEO (search engine optimization), and paid advertising (SEM)
- Protector: online brand protection, defensive SEO, online crisis response, and online brand management
- Teacher: Blogging instructor, guest lecturer, and online teacher since 1996

CLIENTS

- Technology Strategy reports commissioned for Deutsche Telekom
- Web Strategy document commissioned by Diversion Media for Travelistic launch
- Web Strategy document commissioned by Friendster
- Word of Mouth campaign commissioned by HostNuke for EggDisk file storage service
- Online buzz marketing proposal commissioned by Red Bricks Media for their client’s use
- Client contact for Wal-Mart’s innovative blog outreach campaign, including prospecting and messaging (Edelman)
- Co-produced successful online advocacy proposals to GE, Nissan, Shell, the American Petroleum Institute (API), and Wal-Mart Realty (Edelman)
- Developed, deployed, and launched client and internal corporate blogs, marketing blogs, vertical industry blogs, PR blogs, promotional blogs, public affairs blogs, social networks, and podcasts, including Club TomTom, New Media Sense, Extreme Mortman, and others. (NMS)
- Client service work included Sci-Fi Channel (Mad Mad House, Tripping the Rift, Battlestar Galactica), Buena Vista (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), TomTom, Paramount Pictures, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney, Reebok, EA (UXO, Sim-City Online), RCA (American Idol CD), and NBC (Revelations), etc. (NMS)

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Founding Partner, Abraham Harrison LLC — 10/2006-Present
- On-site training, briefing, and client pitching as online buzz marketing and SEO expert
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert, focusing on both brand promotion and protection in search
- Online Buzz Marketing, Online Word-of-Mouth Marketing, and Online Viral Marketing expert
- Consulting and guiding PR and Marketing firms in their creation of Online Marketing practices
- Technology Strategy reports commissioned by COMTEG for Deutsche Telekom and T-Online
- Work and expertise partnership collaboration between crayon LLC and Abraham Harrison LLC
- Online buzz marketing proposal commissioned by Red Bricks Media for their client use
- Designed and developed opt-in membership Email and messaging campaigns
- Developed online word-of-mouth marketing strategy and tactics used on Usenet, message boards, social networks, and blogs
- Developed online advocacy and outreach campaigns for clients’ products, services, and message
- Produced internal and client protective and promotional SEO campaigns and search strategy to highlight positive online conversation and suppress negative conversation on popular search engines
- Developed in-house expertise on blogging, new media, podcasting, technology, citizen journalism, and CGM, including training, teaching, and the development of blogging and online marketing strategy
- Managed online advertising campaigns using Yahoo and Google contextual ads
- Fully-monetized network of blogs and affiliate web sites
- Affiliate keyword marketing and contextual advertising
- Search engine optimization (SEO) and online promotion
- Administration of multiple WordPress, Moveable Type, and Drupal blogs on dedicated server
- Blog strategy and planning for high-traffic, high-profile blog relaunch
- Customized Moveable Type installation on CentOS dedicated server
- Transition from TypePad to newest Movable Type 3.34 install
- Monetization of blogs, including BlogAds and Google AdSense placement
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of blogs
- Manage Google Apps Premier hosting of Email for Abraham Harrison LLC
- Manage CentOS dedicated server hosting Drupal, WordPress, and Movable Type installations

Sales Representative, Visible Technologies — 1/2007-Present
- Sell and promote TruCast and TruView SEO and online advocacy ASP solutions online and in Washington, DC

Associate, crayon LLC — 3/2007-Present
- Work and expertise partnership collaboration between crayon LLC and Abraham Harrison LLC
- Audited all crayon LLC sites and blogs for SEO, UI, architecture, branding, and marketing strategy

Senior RSS Consultant, Hinchcliffe & Company — 1/2007-Present
- On-site syndication strategist for T. Rowe Price Information Technology (TRPIT)
- Research and development towards deploying a public, consumer-focused RSS product
- Solution included a customized ATOM 1.0 feed supplying daily mutual fund pricing
- Solution included a Google Gadget and a Live.com Microsoft Gadget alternative
- Solution included subscription strategies for Bloglines, Google Personalized Home Page, etc.

Director of Social Media, COMTEG.COM — 12/2006-Present
- Web2.0 strategy analyst for major European telecom company
- Produced case studies on Web2.0, Revver, digg, Google Reader, Google, YouTube, Helio, VOX, Dodgeball, Second Life
- Produced case studies on prediction markets: Inkling Markets, PROTRADE, Blogshares, Washington Stock Exchange (WSX), The simExchange, newsfutures, RealityMarkets, Consensus Point (Foresight Server, Foresight on Demand), NewsFuture (Prediction Trader)
- Produced case studies on online personal and public calendars: Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, AOL Calendar, Apple iCal, Microsoft Live, Upcoming, Eventful,
- Produced case studies on blog and feed search engines: Ask.com, Technorati, Google Blogsearch
- Produced case studies on social networking sites: VOX, YouTube, digg
- Produced detailed studies and corporate recommendations on Web2.0 (web 2.0), RSS, widgetization (widgets, Google Gadgets, desktop gadgets), long tail strategy
- Produced case studies on online address books and online contacts and networks: Plaxo
- Direct engagement and recommendations for web2.0 strategy

Consultant, Travelistic.com, Diversion Media — 8/2006-10/2006
- Web strategy document commissioned by Nicolas Butterworth
- Word-of-Mouth and buzz marketing strategy document and hiring recommendations
- Search engine optimization (SEO) strategy document

Independent Web Strategies Consultant — 8/2006-Present
- On-site training, briefing, and client pitching as online buzz marketing and SEO expert
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert, focusing on both brand promotion and protection in search
- Online Buzz Marketing, Online Word-of-Mouth Marketing, and Online Viral Marketing expert
- Consulting and guiding PR and Marketing firms in their creation of Online Marketing practices
- Web Strategy document commissioned by Nicholas Butterworth and Diversion Media for Travelistic.com launch
- Web Strategy document commissioned by Friendster
- Word of Mouth campaign commissioned by HostNuke for EggDisk file storage service
- Online buzz marketing proposal commissioned by Red Bricks Media for their client use

Senior Account Supervisor, Online Advocacy, Edelman — 5/2006-8/2006
- Client contact for Wal-Mart’s innovative blog outreach campaign, including prospecting and messaging
- Spearheaded Working Families for Wal-Mart blog, newsletter, and activation list
- Developed online word of mouth outreach for Taylor Hicks webcast from Wal-Mart shareholder’s meeting
- Co-produced Exposing the Paid Critics blog for Working Families for Wal-Mart
- Co-produced successful online advocacy proposals to GE, Nissan, Shell, the American Petroleum Institute (API), and Wal-Mart Realty
- Designed and developed opt-in membership Email and messaging campaigns

Technology Strategist, New Media Strategies, Inc. — 9/2003-5/2006
- Developed online word-of-mouth marketing strategy and tactics used on Usenet, message boards, social networks, and blogs
- Developed online advocacy and outreach campaigns for clients’ products, services, and message
- Produced internal and client protective and promotional SEO campaigns and search strategy to highlight positive online conversation and suppress negative conversation on popular search engines
- Developed in-house expertise on blogging, new media, podcasting, technology, citizen journalism, and CGM, including training, teaching, and the development of blogging and online marketing strategy
- Developed, deployed, and launched client and internal corporate blogs, marketing blogs, vertical industry blogs, PR blogs, promotional blogs, public affairs blogs, social networks, and podcasts, including Club TomTom, New Media Sense, Extreme Mortman, and others.
- Managed online advertising campaigns using Yahoo and Google contextual ads
- Client service work included Sci-Fi Channel (Mad Mad House, Tripping the Rift, Battlestar Galactica), Buena Vista (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), TomTom, Paramount Pictures, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney, Reebok, EA (UXO, Sim-City Online), RCA (American Idol CD), and NBC (Revelations), etc . . .

Consultant, Blog Production and Strategy, BoldMouth — 8/2006-Present
- Blog strategy and planning for high-traffic, high-profile blog relaunch
- Customized Moveable Type installation on CentOS dedicated server
- Transition from TypePad to newest Movable Type 3.31 install
- Monetization of blog, including BlogAds and Google AdSense placement
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of blog

Director of Sales, eResources, LLC — 9/2002-9/2003
- Managed sales force and new business for the ITonDemand and the eResources Content Management System products

Senior Web Developer, National Legal Aid & Defender Association — 2/2002 – 9/2002
- Developed Web applications and content management system (CMS) developer using Zope, Python, and MySQL

Managing Director, beehive North America — 7/2000-2/2002
- President, co-owner, and co-founder of beehive North America, the North American office of Berlin-based beehive elektronische medien GmbH
- Sold and marketed software Zope application development training and services
- Clients included College of Exploration, The Nature Conservancy, and Space Telescope Science, and Pfizer Global Research and Development (PGRD)

Online Community Builder, Caucus Systems, Inc. — 7/1999-6/2000
- Online community, online conference, and online event facilitator and host
- Linux/Unix system administrator (LAMP SA)

Senior Information Engineer, FCBS — 12/1997-7/1999
- On-site consultant for US Department of Treasury Chief Information Office (CIO)
- Core duties included HTML, scripting (Perl, SSI), programming, graphic design, management, development, and deployment of the CIO Intranet and public website

Teacher, Education for the Arts (EFA), KRESA — 8/1996-6/1998
- High school teacher of the first fully accredited virtual online high school creative writing course for Kalamazoo, MI, Public Schools arts magnet program

Software Engineer, Proxicom, Inc. (Proxima in 1996) — 1/1996-8/1996
- Internet web application developer for the seminal web application company

Technical and Customer Support, Picture Network International (PNI) — 7/1993-8/1995
- Help desk for Industry’s second dial-up online stock photo agency
- Start-up funded and supported by SRA and Tribune Media Company

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Guest Lecturer on History Blogging, History in the Digital Age, American University — 1/31/2007

Guest Speaker, “What is RSS? And How can it change my life?,” AOL University, AOL — 2/8/2007

Blogging Instructor, The Writer’s Center — 2/2006-Present

Blogger, Because the Medium is the Message — 1999-Present

Stock Photographer, Pacific Stock — 1990-Present

Stock Photographer, Corbis — 1990-2004

Guest Lecturer on Public Affairs Blogging, SIPA, Columbia University — 10/15/1005

Emergent Technologies Advisor, Communications Advisory Board, Urban Institute.

Participant Member, Moderator and Speaker, Renaissance Weekends, Renaissance Institute

Partner of Counsel, Haft, Harrison & Wolfson, Inc.

Associate, Howard Rheingold Associates

Founder and Organizer, DC Zope Python User Group (ZPUG)

EDUCATION AND TRAINING
The George Washington University, Washington, DC
- BA, American Literature, Minor Creative Writing, 1993

University of Hawaii, Manoa Campus, Honolulu, HI
- Intensive course work, French, 1992

University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
- Junior year abroad, English and American Studies (EAS), 1990-1991

I got to spend some time hanging out with Martin Marty at Renaissance Weekend a couple years ago. All I knew about him was gleaned from lunches, dinners, and panels together. During last night’s run, my friend Marty Marty started speaking into my iPod earbuds in the form of an interview on Speaking of Faith, America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty Download MP3, Listen, Podcast, and uncut interview with Martin Marty (1:38). God bless Martin Marty and thank you, Krista Tippett.

Transcript of America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty

Billboard:

Krista Tippett, host: I’m Krista Tippett, today a conversation about religion in America, with one of the great public theologians of our time, Martin Marty. For decades, Martin Marty has been watching developments that are now the stuff of daily headlines: the rise of religious fundamentalism across the world, the decline of the Protestant majority in American culture, and the vigor of evangelical Christianity in American life. Marty offers historical and personal perspective.

Mr. Martin Marty: I’ve often thought — I’ve often said, ‘If Billy Graham had been born mean, we’d be in terrible trouble,’ because he had so much power, so many gifts, and so on. One of my distinctions in religion is not liberal and conservative, but mean and non-mean. You have mean liberals and mean conservatives, and you have non-mean of both.

Ms. Tippett: Martin Marty on America’s changing religious landscape. This is Speaking of Faith. Stay with us.

[Announcements]

Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett. For decades, Martin Marty has been watching developments that are the stuff of daily headlines and partisan rhetoric: the vigor of evangelical Christianity in politics, the decline of the Protestant majority in American culture, and the rise of religious fundamentalism around the world. Today we’ll probe the historical perspective of this leading scholar of religion. We’ll discuss what’s really new in religion as a force in American culture, politics, and daily life.

From American Public Media, this is Speaking of Faith, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. Today, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty.”

Martin Marty has been called the foremost interpreter of religion in America today. The National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences are just a few of the honors he has amassed. He’s served on U.S. presidential commissions and directed a visionary research project on religious fundamentalism. The University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for 35 years, has created the Martin Marty Center to continue his work on public religion.

But for all his celebrity and scholarship, Martin Marty draws crucial insight from his own personal grounding in the mainstream religious life of American culture. He began his working life not as a scholar but as a pastor. He was born into a Lutheran family in 1928, in the Nebraska of Dust Bowl and Depression, where his father was a teacher and a church organist.

Mr. Marty: We were a churched family, of course, it was my father’s profession, and I’ve reminisced with some folks about how I got babysat next to the organ bench and had to sit through long funerals as a child, and somehow it didn’t turn me off from it all. I have a brother and a sister, and the three of us were well-schooled in literature and music and art, and also a very close basic sense of the faith of ordinary people, and I’ve tried to keep some sense of that in my lifework.

Ms. Tippett: Much of Martin Marty’s investigation into American religious life has centered on the dominant majority religion at the heart of our culture, the many denominations of mainline Protestant Christianity. But in our time, surveys show that majority is disappearing even as many Americans perceive the influence of evangelical Protestant Christianity to be growing. In his 2004 book, The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism, Marty describes the centuries from 1607 to 1955 as an era in American history in which “Protestants ran the show.” That began to change and take on new dimensions in the 1960s, an era vivid in the American popular imagination for political movements and the Vietnam War. For Martin Marty, it was also a decade of astonishing religious turning points whose significance went unnoticed. I asked him to walk me through the religious watersheds of the 1960s that began to erode the dominance of mainline Protestantism.

Mr. Marty: The biggest single event that hit this country happened in Rome, and that’s the Second Vatican Council. That is, Protestantism always knew what it was because it knew what Catholicism was, and it was over against that. Suddenly, Catholicism is friendly. It moves out into the public sector. The GI Bill puts Catholic young people into universities. They soon became the most educated group in the country, and Protestants were thrown off balance by that.

Secondly, it’s the beginning of the surge of evangelicalism within Protestantism, which — in those days, I imagine a lot of the Protestant leaders kind of sneered at Billy Graham and looked down their nose at tent revivals and so on and didn’t pay much attention to see how it was coming. And suddenly in the ’60s, I visited Berkeley, you had the Jesus People, little girls getting baptized in their bikinis, and change of worship from a certain kind of formality. The rock bands were coming in. And another huge infusion was an awareness of the religions of the East. You might keep going to your Presbyterian church, but you start doing yoga and you start doing Buddhist disciplines, etc. And you didn’t stop being Presbyterian, but you were of a different sort. You didn’t take it all for granted.

Ms. Tippett: I also think that something we’ve lost a memory of is how much tension there was between Catholics and Protestants, right, in this country, between different kinds of Christians, in a way that is absolutely unimaginable now. And I mean, personally for you, was that shift surprising?

Mr. Marty: I, in 1956, was invited to join the staff of The Christian Century, which was the towering Protestant voice. Today it still is, if not towering, a strong voice, but it’s ecumenical. It has a lot of Catholic writers; it has a lot of evangelical writers. But at that time, it was Protestant, and it was anti-Catholic. In 1950, on the cover of The Christian Century, there was an article, “Pluralism, A National Menace.” Pluralism was they’re worried about Catholicism. When I joined the staff five years later, pluralism was the best game in town. My first visits to campus, you always had one priest, one minister, one rabbi; that was called pluralism back then. But through that all, the Protestant still was in a privileged position. It simply was a kind of a reflex: ‘We’re the largest. We’re the ones who left our stamp on America’s literature, its poetry, its statecraft, etc.’

I’m going to say something in case I’m sounding critical.

Ms. Tippett: You can sound critical if you’d like to.

Mr. Marty: I’d be happy to be critical, but I don’t want to be distorting what I want to be. And that is to say, for all of that reflexive sense of establishment, I think I’m being a neutral, value-free historian when I say I don’t know any time in human history that somebody that powerful yielded that gracefully. In the previous century, Protestantism was often used — white Protestantism — to enslave, and it was used to justify the reservating of the Indians. But in the 20th century, Protestants have sort of said, ‘All right, you’re making your case. We’ll make room for you.’ They weren’t doing that much before the mid-’50s, but from then on in, they have done it even at the expense to their own identity.

Ms. Tippett: And I’m sure you’ve read these statistics that are now coming out, that perhaps today or tomorrow or six months from now, there will no longer be a Protestant majority in this country. And it depends on how people measure these things but, still, it seems significant when what is replacing the number of people who say that they’re Protestant are more people who say that they have no religion at all. In fact, it’s very high among people who were born in 1980 or later. And then there’s a category that’s doubled, of people who call themselves just Christian, right, who don’t identify with a specific tradition. How do you explain these statistics?

Mr. Marty: First of all, I think that Protestantism and Catholicism have very common fates here. They both have had trouble holding their younger generation. In some respects, the Protestants, Catholics, and Jews of the northern part of the United States share a lot with Canada, which is far less involved with church, or Western Europe, which is far, far less involved. Incidentally, that little section, I call it the spiritual ice belt: Western Europe, the British Isles, Canada and the northern U.S. We are really exceptions in the world, and we are really having a hard time catching up with understanding the rest of the world.

Protestantism is not in trouble around the world. I am a Lutheran, and we’ve had 300 years to get about eight million people. In 15 years from now, the African Lutheran churches will have added as many people as it took us 300 years to get. And that’s true of many other Protestantisms and Pentecostalisms. Every day there are 23,000 new Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, and half of them would be called Protestant, if often in the Pentecostal version. So around the world, it’s not a losing force. No longer, however, does it make the reference it once did to Western Europe and its daughter, the United States.

What will that mean for the United States? I don’t think we’re going to wake up some day and see total change. There’s a strange thing that hundreds of years after the vital life of a religion is past, there’s still a strong influence. We’re still living off some of the Greek religious influences. We’re living off a lot of medieval Catholicism. Our very universities are inventions of that. Our hospitals are inventions of that. So in a sense, meanings, ideas — in this case, ideas of liberty, freedom — that came very often from Protestants will live on even if not everybody goes to church. Still, the churches have been the places where these stories get renewed regularly.

Ms. Tippett: OK. I mean, I just wonder, personally, is this something that troubles you?

Mr. Marty: I don’t think I wake up in the morning having great worries about that. You can tell from what I’ve said I have a global view of humanity and of religion, and it moves around a lot. In the 1930s a great Catholic, Hilaire Belloc, said, “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe.” Well, that was true then. Now the cathedrals are empty, but their granddaughters are full in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. I certainly think that some things borne by the Protestant message would be a great loss. One of its gifts to America was its sense that we’re scripted. It’s a scriptural faith, it’s a Christ-centered faith, but it doesn’t mean that all virtue and all morality goes with you. And I think that’s been a nice irritating voice in classic Protestantism, which is, no matter how far along you’d come, God was holding you to a higher standard.

Ms. Tippett: Religious historian and author Martin Marty. One of the most popular of his over 50 books is Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in American. He is considered by some to be a bridge between the devotional and scholarly worlds of liberal mainline Protestantism and evangelical Christianity.

Ms. Tippett: Let’s talk about evangelical Christianity, which at the same time that there are some statistics of people becoming less religious, there’s certainly a sense that religion in some ways is more of a force now. I mean, I think there would be people who would take your phrase, “When Protestants ran the show,” and say that a certain kind of Christianity is becoming almost a controlling force or, you know, we have an evangelical Christian in the White House. I mean, how are you observing what’s happening now, with your broad view of things and of history?

Mr. Marty: I think those of us who write this kind of history are a little puzzled by the naiveté of the — well, people in journalism, in the media, in the general public, who think all this just got invented in the last four years and couple months. It has very deep roots. I trace it not to the ’20s. Nobody cared about the religion of Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. And Roosevelt was a mainline Protestant, Episcopalian, and he could draw upon these themes very much. Harry Truman was a salty Baptist. Truman and Carter and Clinton, the three Baptist presidents of the century, know the Bible best. They can just recite reams of it at any moment. Eisenhower started having Billy Graham come by. When we say “evangelical” today, it’s almost a long shadow originally of Graham. Today, evangelicalism is multi-headed. It’s all over the place. You can’t really generalize about it much anymore, but in its purer form, it came up in that way.

And, yes, in ’64, they really galvanized around Barry Goldwater and the kind of conservatism. And they didn’t get very far because he didn’t get very far, but they got angry about being dismissed and so on. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter ran, he’s the first one who would say, ‘I’m born again,’ first one to say, ‘I had a personal experience with Jesus,’ but they soon dropped him because they didn’t like him politically. Ronald Reagan was not born again, but he was friendly to them. But you could see this long trend coming.

Robert Handy, one of our major historians, once wrote a little book on The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935, because the mainline churches were already beginning to lose some of their membership, their status. They were depressed. But Joel Carpenter, another historian, has since pointed out, through it all the fundamentalists who’d been disgraced in the 1920s started organizing. They bought radio stations. They started Bible colleges. They had magazines. And they were building a world inside the world. And suddenly along come people like Billy Graham and presidents who favor it, and you have a very different kind of pattern, so that by the time — I would say by the time of Ronald Reagan, it became so vivid that the normal clergy in the White House would be evangelists, usually, until recently, of a rather moderate sort.

Ms. Tippett: It also seems to me, though, that a mistake is made in media in lumping together — as you said, evangelicalism is a — there’s a multiplicity of evangelicalism, and evangelicalism has a very different history and theology in some cases from Pentecostals and certainly from fundamentalists, although there is some overlap. How would you explain the distinctions?

Mr. Marty: All right. To the sociologists, the slightly more than one-fourth of America that would be called evangelical includes fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, and conservative Protestant denominations. And they really have tremendous differences except when they converge on highly focal and, let’s say, useful political points: gay marriage or something of that sort. But for the most part, they’re much more diverse.

Until around the turn of the last century, all Protestants were called evangelicals; all evangelicals were called Protestant. During the century, though, you started having the liberal churches accenting more the Biblical story applied to social life, economic life, cultural life, whereas those who were evangelical started dealing with private life, personal life. That still goes down in our own time.

Ms. Tippett: Why did that happen? How did that happen?

Mr. Marty: Well, I think the Protestants who ran the show had the sense that you can pass a law and get rid of slavery, you can join secular people to get antitrust laws, you could have child labor laws. All the while then, the revivalists, Billy Graham’s ancestors — the greatest being Dwight Moody, a Chicago evangelist — looked out at the world and saw it in trouble, and he said, ‘The world is a flood, and God gave me a lifeboat and said, “Moody, rescue all you can.”‘ And I think they concentrated on heaven, on saving souls. And then on moral issues, they chose those over which an individual could have control: You shouldn’t gamble. You shouldn’t swear. You shouldn’t drink.

Now what’s so interesting today is, what have come to be called social issues in recent campaigns are not social, they’re personal enlarged. In other words, the evangelicals and the fundamentalists and the Catholic conservatives concentrate on what goes on in the bedroom, and they don’t talk much the way classic Protestants did about should the government be involved with poverty, with waging peace, all of those kinds of things. It’s been their genius to organize that in our own time so they have great political power. The Republican Party in particular has seen that that can be amassed and help get votes for things outside of the bedroom.

Ms. Tippett: Although there certainly are Catholics and evangelicals who are mobilized around poverty and those more classic kinds of social justice issues.

Mr. Marty: Oh, my, yes. Catholics are very much upfront. And some of the strongest social involvements of today are among evangelical Protestants. But that kind of Catholic and that kind of evangelical and that kind of Protestant are themselves in a kind of a loose coalition today. Not as powerful as the personal morality people, but there’s a lot of power there. A lot of witness goes on.

Ms. Tippett: Religious scholar and author Martin Marty. I’m Krista Tippett and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today we’re exploring Martin Marty’s historical and personal perspective on the changing religious dynamics in American culture. For a half-century, he has studied the effect of increasing pluralism on American Christianity. He’s also been a visionary scholar of religious fundamentalist movements around the world.

Ms. Tippett: I want to talk about the Fundamentalism Project that you did but, I mean, before we actually talk about fundamentalism, I’d like to note something that I thought was very interesting. I was reading your address that you gave at the conclusion of that project to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You titled it, “Too Bad We’re So Relevant: The Fundamentalism Project Projected.”

I’ll just read this quote: “The Fundamentalism Project scholars have found that fundamentalists tend to turn intimate and private issues into public affairs. Concern for the zones of life closest to the self — world view, identity, sexuality, gender differentiation, family, education, communication — tend to take priority over macroeconomic concerns.”

So my question to you is, is there something at the origins of fundamentalism that is also moving our culture as a whole right now?

Mr. Marty: OK. One quick word about fundamentalism. The fundamentalism we studied, to which you’re referring, is not your friendly neighborhood fundamentalist down the block. Our assignment was to study the militancies. When we started this, a historian friend said, ‘When you’re studying American fundamentalism, Marty, remember there are no machine guns in the basement of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.’ We were really studying a different kind of thing there, and yet there are certain things everybody had in common.

In the roots of fundamentalism in our culture, it started, of course, anti-evolution, anti-biblical criticism, and then it started taking a moral cast. But its moral cast, again, was the things that you should take control of. Virtue, advice were their big terms, not social justice and social change. Take what is a virtuous person; pass laws to promote that virtue. And I certainly am leaving a wrong impression if I’m suggesting that bedroom and clinical issues don’t have social consequences. They have huge social consequences. If divorce becomes more easy and grows and families disintegrate and children don’t have models in the parental world and they’re not educable, it’s a huge difference in the culture. So they don’t have a monopoly on it either in its invention or its present carrying out, but I think more of them restrict their energies to that and, again, it’s a very politically popular thing to do.

Ms. Tippett: But here’s my question: This description that you gave of fundamentalism, that people turn to intimate and private issues and that these take priority over macroeconomic concerns, could actually, I think, describe maybe a majority of Americans this year. So what I’m wondering is if there’s something that you see that gives rise to that tendency within fundamentalism that is actually alive in our culture as a whole right now.

Mr. Marty: I think two things are going on. On one level, around the world people are having trouble with their identity, their belief — whom do I trust, who trusts me? And so a phrase we used in The Fundamentalism Project, around the world, there is a massive, convulsive ingathering of peoples into their separatenesses and over-againstnesses, to protect their pride and power and place from others who are doing the same thing. Now, look at American life. We don’t do it the way they do it in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. We don’t veil women or anything like that, but we’re clustering more tightly. ‘We’re the virtuous, and they’re the vicious. We’re the good, they’re the evil.’

Ms. Tippett: I guess I’m still wondering how you understand the human and spiritual–maybe not theological, but the spiritual roots of this focus that seems to have become so definitive in our public life, on private issues of morality as the issues of morality.

Mr. Marty: I think that all through Christian history, anything related to sexuality was troubling and exciting. Clerical celibacy for 1700 years in Catholicism shows this, how much of an upheaval was caused when Martin Luther got married and when the Protestant clergy married. Every change in sexual mores is troubling because that’s so close to the roots of creation and transmission of life. Now what’s happened in our own time, I argue, every church body from the Mennonites to the evangelicals to the Roman Catholic Church are torn up over two words: sex and authority. By sex, I mean everything in the biological cycle, from in vitro fertilization or stem cell research, abortion, birth control, cohabitation outside of marriage. All these things are troubling all the churches, some of them sweeping…

Ms. Tippett: And dividing people in them.

Mr. Marty: Oh, yes. Some people sweep these things under the rug or close their eyes to it or whatever. But I think it’s very hard to get to the root of your part of the question as to why this longtime concern for personal morality, sexual morality, suddenly became so politically powerful. On one level, let’s be honest, it’s very exploitable. Everything else I’ve talked about — caring for peace, caring for justice, caring for feeding — these are all relative things. How much foreign aid budget you’re going to put into it, how much energy you’re going to put into it. With abortion, you either have an abortion or you don’t. You either perform gay right marriage or not. So it can be a big matter of identity and boundary, and I think that’s very popular in a time when people lose their identity and their boundary. I always say that the laws on gay rights and the practices toward them will be changed when every tenth evangelical minister’s daughter comes out. That is, when it gets close to you, you see these differently.

Ms. Tippett: So liberal — let’s say, Democrats and even liberal religious people who also have been struggling to find a voice in this last period will often hearken back to the days when it was the social justice issues that mobilized people and that had political force. Did those issues somehow achieve that force in the ’60s because they became more personal for people and, I mean, could you imagine that happening again?

Mr. Marty: Oh, I think so. The personalization of civil rights, you suddenly had a face: Martin Luther King. You suddenly had causes: the four little Birmingham girls who were bombed. These are very, very vivid things so that the president of the United States had to get on television one night, and after you’d seen the pictures of the dogs attacking children and police attempts to put down blacks in the South, suddenly it did become personal.

I should also say in fairness — I’m really trying to be as accurate as I can — these involvements of white Protestants in peace movements and civil rights movements that was never massive. That was often leadership. Some people would call them generals without armies. And there’s where I think we historians have kept saying a lot of evangelicals were up close, they were getting their hands dirty. The Salvation Army, for example, is an evangelical movement, one of the oldest. So we don’t have any absolute lines here at all. I just think that the sudden choice to organize on the virtue-vice line, the ‘we’re entirely right and they’re entirely wrong’ line, was very exploitable in politics, and in many, many states that has come to prevail as the main political agency. Nobody would have dreamed of that 20 years ago.

Ms. Tippett: Historian and author Martin Marty. This is Speaking of Faith. After a short break, more of his reflections on the nature of fundamentalism, separation of church and state, and the future of religion in America.

Mr. Marty: I once spoke in eastern Iowa and they said, ‘Well, you live in pluralism.’ I said, ‘Where’s the oldest mosque in American? It’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.’ And they have Postville Lubavitcher Jews north of them, and they have transcendental meditation south of them, and they have gypsies east of them, and Amish west of them. That’s the America we have. It doesn’t mean it’s all easy, doesn’t mean everybody likes everybody.

Ms. Tippett: Visit our Web site, speakingoffaith.org. Subscribe to our free weekly podcast so you can listen to this and other archived programs again. Listen when you want, wherever you want. Discover more at speakingoffaith.org.

I’m Krista Tippett. Stay with us. Speaking of Faith comes to you from American Public Media.

[Announcements]

Ms. Tippett: Welcome back to Speaking of Faith, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. I’m Krista Tippett, today exploring America’s contemporary religious landscape with Martin Marty.

Martin Marty is a celebrated historian and interpreter of American religious life. This hour he’s been reflecting on the religious dynamics of contemporary America from his perspective of half a century of scholarship. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the present, he’s been involved in many large-scale analyses of American Protestantism in particular, including its cultural influence and its pluralistic impulses.

And from 1987 to 1993, well before religious fundamentalism had become a feature of daily news headlines, Marty directed a global fundamentalism project that was commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. That project studied militant religious fundamentalist cultures around the world, and resulted in a five-volume publication. I asked Martin Marty what he learned that surprised him and what shapes his reaction to fundamentalism now.

Mr. Marty: The first thing we learned was that it is religious. That is, we didn’t let the psychologists in the first couple of years. This was a six-year study. We wanted to make sure that we caught the religious dimension and were convinced of that. And therefore fundamentalists, by and large, saw us as being fair. Our main instrument was the tape recorder. We sent out a couple hundred scholars around the world and they would ask, ‘Why are you this?’ and ‘Why do you raise your family that way?’ We studied it in 23 religions, by the way, Jains and Sikhs and everybody; it wasn’t just Christians and Muslims and Jews.

What else did we learn? Number one, fundamentalism is not the old-time religion. Fundamentalism is a very modern packaging. That is, it’s born when there’s an assault on values that you have and are uncertain about. There has to be a threat to you as a group identity or to you as an individual. So the most important word in fundamentalism is you react. Very few fundamentalists are concerned about things that traditionalists and regular conservatives and orthodox are. You can’t get a phone booth full of an argument on the most important Christian doctrines like the divine trinity and the two natures of Christ and the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. They care about evolution. They care about being left behind as the world ends. But there’s a very selective agenda. The whole left-behind theology is not the old-time religion. It was invented in the 1840s, which is really the modern world.

Ms. Tippett: For someone like you.

Mr. Marty: That’s right. I move glacially, not with a hurricane. And many other features were modern. Everywhere we studied them, they were better at the use of mass media than modernists were.

Ms. Tippett: Now, that’s interesting.

Mr. Marty: Yes. I once spoke in a church in — I think it was Dallas, and the pulpit looked like a 747 panel. A red light would go on, a baby’s crying in nursery 23C, and another blue light and that means a Jaguar’s lights were left on in parking lot D, and I could raise the temperature and the volume and everything else. And the minister in his sermon later on blasted technology, which he was using. In other words, he blasted the energy put into it, I suppose you’d say.

Well, I can go to a liberal Methodist church and I’m pretty sure the microphone won’t work. I’m kidding, I’m kidding, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution was done through tape recordings from France. Al-Qaeda is very much at home with the Internet.

Ms. Tippett: Very savvy, yeah.

Mr. Marty: Mass media helped produce fundamentalism because — first stage was born in the early radio; the second stage, Billy Graham, early television; the third stage now, Internet. What do you do? It comes at you with full force. You might try laws against obscenity and pornography. You might try to boycott Disney World. That doesn’t do much. You’re better off starting your own television networks. ‘Mass media are what messed up the intimacy of my family life; I’ll turn it right back upon itself.’

Ms. Tippett: So as late as on September 11th, 2001, the word “fundamentalism” became a part of our public vocabulary. And I’m curious, as you watched that happen and have watched all the discussion since then, having spent this good block of time studying fundamentalism a decade earlier, what have you found to be missing in our analysis of fundamentalism recently?

Mr. Marty: I think, unfortunately, the word is used to clump everybody together. The overuse of the word “fundamentalism” — I should be claiming a patent on it because we did those five big fat books on it. But one of the themes of those five books was there are an awful lot of things out there and there’s a lot of internal diversity. We would remind people — for example, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s had 450,000 members in Indiana, in the North, and every meeting had a Protestant minister, it had a cross, it had the open Bible, it had prayer, and the rest of Protestantism and the rest of Christianity would say, ‘That’s not a bit representative of the one billion of us out there.’ So I think when al-Qaeda came on the scene that was our first message: Show the diversities. Make it easier for moderates to be moderate. Don’t demonize the enemy. Do all that you can to show their varieties and to make it easy for them to be diverse.

Ms. Tippett: Esteemed religious historian and author Martin Marty. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty.”

Ms. Tippett: You’ve lived a good long time as a public theologian and a religious thinker, and you quote a lot of great thinkers in all your works. I wonder, if I asked you who you think of as the most formative and influential religious figures in American life in the 20th century, who would you want to describe?

Mr. Marty: Among the well-known people, I would have to say the two Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, who towered at Union Seminary and Yale when Protestantism was strong. They both were strong for the prophetic principle. They weren’t good at leading you into worship, though they did write prayers. But they were up close. They were in the thick of things.

Reinhold was a “cold warrior.” He was a consultant in the Truman era to the Dean Achesons and then the John Foster Dulleses. He’s there. But his interpretation of human nature — on one level, there was a group called Atheists for Niebuhr, but he once said, ‘You’ll never understand me if you don’t know that I believe in Christ crucified.’ He always went back to his roots in the gospel, but they also appreciated his analysis of human nature was so realistic, and his interpretation of history and the place nations played.

Ms. Tippett: Here’s a favorite quotation of the 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, with which Martin Marty ended an address at the White House in 1998.

Reader: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Ms. Tippett: From Reinhold Niebuhr.

My guest, Martin Marty, is describing some of the most interesting and influential religious forces in his lifetime.

Mr. Marty: I certainly would have to put Billy Graham in the front rank. And I may not have always been in the same camp, we’ve exchanged a few nice letters and have never had a sour word in 30, 40 years, but there’s no doubt about it that I’ve often thought — I’ve often said, ‘If Billy Graham had been born mean, we’d be in terrible trouble,’ because he had so much power, so many gifts and so on. One of my distinctions in religion is not liberal and conservative, but mean and non-mean. You have mean liberals and mean conservatives, and you have non-mean of both. But he’s not a mean. And I think you’d have to say that’s just been an enormous influence on many people.

Paul Tillich, of German import, was highly influential theologically. But I really think that people whose names you’ll never know were influential.

Ms. Tippett: Right. And who are some of those that are important to you?

Mr. Marty: Well, a custodian at a high school I went to. You’d come there in the morning and, as busy as he might be pushing a broom, he read your face better than the counselors did as to what your trouble was.

I personally have a lot of interest in the arts and I have hung out with people who are in music. Recently I was at the dedication of a new organ in honor of Paul Manz, a great, great organist who brought back something as corny-sounding as hymn singing into the great cathedrals. He and I have been on a couple of CDs together. I assure anybody listening that I don’t sing, I narrate. But certainly Paul Manz would be in my front rank of people who shaped me.

A theologian named Joe Sittler, not among the best-known theologians in America, blind in the last years of his life, nearly deaf, had a way with words and a way of discernment and a good-humored understanding of ethics that made the world richer for me.

Reader: A reading from Joseph Sittler in the 1986 book Gravity and Grace:

“St. Augustine, at the beginning of his Confessions, makes a great and beautiful statement: ‘Thou has made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.’ Back of that statement lies a proposition which says that the human is created for transcendence … that we are by nature created to envision more than we can accomplish, to long for that which is beyond our possibilities.

“We are formed for God. …Faith is a longing. Humankind is created to grasp more than we can grab, to probe for more than we can ever handle or manage.

“…This restlessness may make us want to throw in the towel — or to pull up our socks. You can either be creatively restless, as before the unknowable, or you can simply collapse into futility. One of the goals of the Christian message is to join together the people of the way, the way of an eternally given restlessness, and to win from that restlessness the participation in God, which is all that our mortality can deliver.”

Theologian Joseph Sittler, from the book Gravity and Grace.

Ms. Tippett: You often mention a Dutch philosopher.

Mr. Marty: Oh, yes.

Ms. Tippett: How do you say his name?

Mr. Marty: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who was a Swiss-German Jew and Christian. He’s one of those geniuses that you can quote 20 pages of and then the 21st page is so nutty you’re not sure you can use it. But I’ll give a quick illustration of what I get from him. For example, he says — and this is extremely important in my life. He says you can write the history of learning in the western world in three Latin phrases.

The first is, in Latin, Credo ut intelligum — “I believe in order that I may understand.” It’s the birth of the universities in Europe, Bologna, Paris, Oxford. You believe to apprehend the universe; truth is divinely revealed and can be appropriated. And that’s the charter that believers should never be afraid of learning.

Secondly, modern learning, without which we couldn’t do, is Descartes. René Descartes. Cogito ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am.” Modern university is born on skepticism and doubt and inquiry and criticism, and you want that. I don’t want a med school in which they’re just taking things on faith. I want them to be extremely critical. But he said, ‘That, too, gets sterile.’ And so he says, in the 20th century, that we also have to learn that truth has a social character. I’m learning from this conversation with you. We learn from conversing with someone else, we learn from the meaning of “I” and “thou.”

And his third motto was Respondeo etsi mutabor — “I respond although I will be changed.” I’m not changed when I argue with somebody because I know an answer and I got to defeat them. I’m always changed in a conversation because they’re going to surprise me. It’s kind of a game, it’s kind of play. And I think that that’s the kind of learning we need more in the churches, in theology, in politics, and in personal life.

Ms. Tippett: You’ve done a lot of projecting in your life. I mean, I found one book written in 1971 where you were projecting the church in that century, and there was projecting in The Fundamentalism Project. I wonder what you have been wrong about, as you look back, and also I wonder, as you look forward, where you are finding your hope and nurture.

Mr. Marty: Well, looking ahead, it’s a very foolish thing for a historian to do because we have nothing to say until something’s happened. I mean, our specialty is the past. But when you’re involved in the worlds in which I’m involved, you do hang out with the people who do projecting and you go along with them. My biggest misses were I didn’t foresee three huge things: One, the explosion of evangelicalisms; number two, the highly individualized spirituality of which you spoke earlier, the people who are on a spiritual search but they’re doing it at the coffee shop, at the mega bookstore, or they’re doing it in a little chanting group, and they’re not doing it in the churches. That’s certainly a force I hadn’t foreseen. And then I think the vitality that has come with the new pluralism, and that’s because I did a lot of writing before 1965 when the immigration laws changed.

Ms. Tippett: That’s another one of those points in the ’60s that you say how important that was for our religious life, that we never talk about as a turning point in the ’60s.

Mr. Marty: Well, it’s huge. It was the year of the Selma March. It was the year of the engagement in Vietnam. It was the year of all the LBJ Great Society legislation, and Congress made a little change in the immigration laws, after 41 years. And it was just in time for all the boat people. It’s just in time for people from Africa to come direct, and so on. And it was just a huge change…

Ms. Tippett: Because it gave rise to a pluralism and a multiculturalism in a new way.

Mr. Marty: Yes. It makes new demands on hospitality, etc. Lewiston, Maine, suddenly has people from Somalia. I once spoke in eastern Iowa and they said, ‘Well, you live in pluralism.’ I said, ‘Where’s the oldest mosque in American? It’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.’ And they have Postville Lubavitcher Jews north of them, and they have transcendental meditation south of them, and they have gypsies east of them, and Amish west of them. That’s the America we have. And when you go to a hospital today, your doctor’s probably Pakistani and your nurse is Filipino, and your clinician is Jewish, etc. That’s our future. It doesn’t mean it’s all easy, doesn’t mean everybody likes everybody, but it does mean that your interpreting is being done on a larger scale.

And, again, the two biggest of those — and I guess you could say I probably didn’t foresee that either, since we’re talking about what I didn’t foresee — is that half of everything we’re talking about today is done by women. And that was not true in the ’50s. When I was writing the third volume of my three-volume work on American religion, I said to my class, half of whom were women, ‘Help me out. I need women who are big in religion in the ’50s. I can’t have an index of all men.’ And they couldn’t find hardly anybody. And then one of them said, ‘I’ll bet they were seething.’ And I said, ‘OK, Julie, you’re going to right a history of seething women of the ’50s,’ and she found interesting stuff. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Catherine Marshall, all these people whose husbands are up front, and they’re seething. They’re all ready to change along the way. So I didn’t foresee how sudden and total that is.

It’s hard to think your way back to when very few women added work outside the home if they had children at home. And I think the…

Ms. Tippett: That’s a piece of pluralism we don’t really think about, in terms of how people are active in our public life. Women are more of a force in that way.

Mr. Marty: Oh, yes.

Ms. Tippett: Religious historian Martin Marty. We’re exploring how his historical and personal insights shed light on the religious dynamics of contemporary America.

Ms. Tippett: I think that there is a real sense among many people in our time that the whole relationship between church and state–as we define that, it’s not really just church and state anymore, right, it’s mosque, synagogue, church, and state, and many other variations of religious expression, but that that is shifting profoundly. But I wonder, with your perspective as a historian, you know, how new, how profound is this shift and how do you view this?

Mr. Marty: On one level, the image of the wall of separation never worked. We did never have a wall. For example, tax exemption of churches probably pays more to the churches in America than being established governmental churches in Europe ever did. I like James Madison’s word, there’s a “line of distinction,” a line of separation between religion and civil authorities.

I think of it more, too, as zones. Most people know when you’ve really overstepped. Most people don’t want religion utterly in a box. When the astronauts looked at the Earth on Christmas Eve, they read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.” I think Madalyn Murray O’Hair and one or two other people protested, but most people thought, ‘That’s great.’ And when you have the space shuttle disasters, the president gets up and is at his most eloquent invoking religious language. Well, if you read real separation of religion and the state, you wouldn’t do that.

It gets more complex in some other areas. There is much more eroding of that line than there had been. I think, though, again, many of us who are nervous about crossing the line are also interested in religion in public life. I’m all for the teaching about religion in public schools. I think you should know that Martin Luther King was a black Baptist and what that did for him. You should know why the Puritans came. You should know why your Hindu neighbor does something different. But a lot of people want to convert that and say, ‘But we should teach the majority religion as the truth about life, and we should worship in that tradition.’ And that’s where we get nervous, and yet there’s a strong popular appeal. ‘If only we had prayer amendments. If only we had stipulated prayer.’ And here’s where a Protestant of the old school or a real Protestant would say, ‘Watch out. Give religion privilege and it gets corrupt. And look at Europe if you want a sample of that.’ So in my view, religion has its place all over the public sphere as long as it is persuasive and voluntary. And the minute it gets to be coerced and privileged and assumed, somebody’s going to run it at the expense of others or it’ll get fat and corrupt.

Ms. Tippett: Where do you look for nourishment and hope? Where do you look around and say, ‘This is exciting. I’m happy for my grandchildren to be living in this time’?

Mr. Marty: The most important thing in my world, when I mention public life I don’t mean only politics. A lot of people equate the two. Politics is one branch of it. Public life is town meeting, it’s the mall, it’s the supermarket, it’s the college, it’s all those things. And I’m greatly cheered by artists, by musicians, by people who live out their vocation. It’s almost a hobby for me to pursue people who just never get their name in print and do heroic things.

I’m cheered by — I never know how to speak without proper nouns. I like a group called Opportunity International, which is one of a number of microeconomic ventures around the world that lends money, put 140,000 people around the world to permanent work last year. Now, they’re religiously motivated people and they give me tremendous hope, as do the people on the other end, 92 percent of whom pay their loans back in two years, which inspires me. That kind of thing.

In the city where I live, Chicago, there are all kinds of groups that provide leadership in the inner city without condescension, without imposing on them. There are others that train people. In one of these groups, the Christian Industrial League, trains people, mainly Mexican men, to start their landscaping companies and women to start their homemaking companies — not just to do the work, but to start companies. And they plant the flowers that we see in the city of Chicago. Come see them.

And family is very important. I draw nurture from the family. We love friends. I can’t say enough — I once wrote a book about friendship. In a cold, brutal world, you can’t do much better for somebody else than to stimulate friendship. And the model there again is God. As distant as God’s supposed to be, God also condescends and is our 3:00-in-the-morning friend. So I’m nurtured by all those kinds of things.

Ms. Tippett: Martin Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. The Martin Marty Center has been founded there to promote public religion endeavors. He’s the author of more than 50 books, including, recently, The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism, When Faiths Collide, and the Penguin Lives volume on Martin Luther.

Contact us at speakingoffaith.org and read listeners’ reflections on this conversation. Also, sign up for the free Speaking of Faith podcast. You’ll never have to miss another program again. Listen on demand, when you want, wherever you want. Discover more at speakingoffaith.org.

The senior producer of Speaking of Faith is Mitch Hanley, with producers Colleen Scheck and Jody Abramson and editor Ken Hom. Our Web producer is Trent Gilliss, with assistance from Jennifer Krause. Kate Moos is the managing producer of Speaking of Faith, the executive editor is Bill Buzenberg, and I’m Krista Tippett.

Creating a space for your members to “show off” or “express themselves” is less important than giving members to interact. They crave connection and will pursue any perceived connection such as shared interests, hometowns, movies, orientation, or schools.

They’re not at all about sharing, they’re about connecting. The best of breed SNS’s are primarily concerned with three things: finding your current friends, reconnecting with old friends, and making new friends. In that order. Current friend connections are the most essential, offering the most energy.

The best SNS’s are like an office ski trip. Out of the 30 people who choose to chip in on the trip, maybe four or five of them are pretty good friends. The remaining 25 have only a few things in common with you, including being in the same industry, being at the same company, liking skiing, and being probably within ten years of each other in age and a shared experience of going to college.

When you get to the ski slope, there are plenty of diversions planned to help you relax and feel comfortable among your colleagues. You may rent a very large home together near the slopes, you might stay at a big hotel together. You might all travel up there together in a chartered bus. And when you arrive, there is a cocktail party, and a social, and in the morning there is breakfast, etc. The people who come up who don’t want to ski have board games and the spa.

So, an SNS is about creating artificial and intentional ways of starting a conversation. Office pools and work happy hours. They’re all affectations. There are so many web sites and blogs and so forth out there that successful SNS’s can’t follow that model.

So, when it comes to building a valuable personal profile for an SNS, it is important that the profile isn’t just pretty and isn’t just the equivalent of a questions-based, template-based personal website. For example, modern SNS’s tend to request an exhaustive list of favorite movies, favorite books, favorite TV shows, etc. These are props that allow registered members to find each other based on a love of LOST, 24, or the Matrix.

People love to connect based on shared interest and shared memories. People also love to compete. A friendly competition is always a very powerful way to allow people to both connect and create shared memories.

One of the most successful methods of connecting people in a very strong way is through bringing them together through “pools.??? Fantasy football is popular; Oscar pools, college basketball pools, etc, are very powerful ways of bringing people together and allowing them to “ski??? together, allowing them to interact in a very powerful, visceral, way.

I have friends who have powerful, shared memories, of Oscar and football and basketball pools; even stronger are the shared memories of seasons of fantasy sports, fantasy football in particular. Unlike catching a real game together, fantasy football can happen 100% online.

Virtual online communities are neither virtual nor are they exclusively online. They are real, powerful, communities of real people building real connections that can, and often do, result in marriages, children, businesses, jobs, and emotional support when times are rough.

“Party strategists and nonpartisan pollsters credit the operative, Mara Vanderslice, and her 2-year-old consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, with helping a handful of Democratic candidates make deep inroads among white evangelical and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.”

Via the New York Times

“The Strategist : Mara Vanderslice of the consulting firm Common Good Strategies, who works the campaign trail, helping candidates build relationships with diverse religious communities.”

Via The Washington Post

“‘There’s been a huge sea change,’ says Mara Vanderslice, former religious outreach adviser to defeated presidential candidate John Kerry. ‘When we started this work on the Kerry campaign there was a lot of disagreement over how much to emphasise reaching out to religious Americans… there’s almost universal understanding now that we need to do a better job of reaching out.’”

Via the BBC

“Casey is “pro-life,??? and Strickland a minister, but similar shifts occurred in other races featuring more-traditional Democratic candidates. Michigan’s Jennifer Gran­holm, for instance, a “pro-choice??? and relatively liberal governor, won 35 percent of the white evangelical vote, a percentage significantly higher than the House Democratic average. All in all, about a half-dozen races impressed Green as scrambling many of our culture-war assumptions. In each of these races, you can argue about the strength of the opponent and other local dynamics, but all of them turn out to have one thing in common: the winning candidate worked extensively with a small political consulting outfit called Common Good Strategies.

Mara Vanderslice, a thirty-one-year-old born-again Christian, founded Common Good in 2005 and later brought on Eric Sapp, thirty, as a partner. Both belong to the small but growing club of evangelicals who are also Democrats. Vanderslice had worked on a couple of Democratic presidential campaigns, and she had found that the reactions of many campaign staffers around her ranged from “ambivalent to hostile??? when she suggested reaching out to religious voters or constituents. But she and Sapp suspected that while the machinery resisted, the candidates themselves might be amenable. This year, Common Good worked closely with seven candidates, testing a new strategy for Democrats trying to court religious voters. All of these candidates won in November.

In each race, Vanderslice and Sapp began by helping candidates build the infrastructure necessary to reach religious voters, often from scratch. “In many cases our party had completely written them off,??? says Sapp. In none of the states in which they worked did the Democratic Party have a complete list of pastors, for example, so Common Good staffers created those lists. In Michigan, they met with about 500 conservative and moderate members of the clergy; in many of the meetings, particularly with evangelical ministers, they would hear something like “Where have you all been???? According to Sapp, “At a fundamental level they just want candidates to give God his due, more than they care about specific issues.???

Common Good helped recruit pastors to write op-eds in response to criticisms and arranged for campaigns to buy mailing lists of religious-minded voters. Vanderslice and Sapp encouraged candidates to buy ads on Christian radio, a medium considered more intimate than television. Strickland did a large radio buy in July—early enough to look like more than an afterthought. For ten years he’d had a quote from Micah on his office wall: “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.??? With uplift-y music in the background, he talked in his ad about how that quote had guided his career and would guide him as governor.

Vanderslice and Sapp helped the candidates create a new language to use in talking about faith and values, aimed in part at neutralizing hot-button issues. On abortion, for instance, they banned the word choice and pushed reduction, going one step further with Clinton’s idea that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare???: “We must work together across our differences to reduce the need and numbers of abortions by reducing unplanned pregnancies and helping women and families get the support they need when facing a crisis pregnancy,??? read a brochure for Sherrod Brown, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio. The idea was that a lot of voters who oppose abortion don’t actually want it to be criminalized; they just want the issue to be recognized as important.

The two consultants also advised candidates to attack Republican positions on moral grounds, from the left. Where anti-gay-marriage amendments came up, for example, they expanded the issue and talked about how many marriages were disintegrating because of financial stress, which they name as the No. 1 cause of divorce in America.”

Via Atlantic Monthly by way of Faith in Public Life

“Should Kerry run for president a second time, such values-based defenses of Democratic policies would no doubt play a greater role than in 2004 when the candidate paid little attention to Casey or evangelical adviser Mara Vanderslice—despite the pair’s involvement with the campaign.

Vanderslice has since proved her counsel is worth heeding. From her new role as director of Common Good Strategies, an independent consulting firm she founded in 2005, the born-again strategist significantly boosted the Democrats’ midterm landslide. Exit polls showed that the candidates she advised pulled in an average of 10 percent more evangelical voters than other Democrats.

Fellow Common Good Strategies consultant Eric Sapp told WORLD such results could signal the beginning of a grand reshaping of the political landscape: “My hope would be that Christians become a perennial swing vote.”"

Via World Magazine by way of Faith in Public Life

The future of Social Network Services (SNS) can be discovered on High School and College campuses. I believe that topic-specific “vertical” SNS’s are very important, but I also think that the model needs to be University-like – a modularized SNS. There needs to be a campus “brand” (or University) within which the topic-specific “clubs,” “houses,” “fraternities,” “dorms,” and “interest groups” can interact – somewhere where crossovers, cross-fertilization, and aggregation are encouraged – no, needs – to happen. I hate SNS sites like boompa.com – a site devoted to your favorite cars – because I am not JUST a car guy.

I am a car guy for sure but I am also interested in rowing, in biking, in Thomas Pynchon, and in talk radio – Boompa might be successful in the short term, but in the long-term, the real power would come from creating a open, creative, resource-rich platform/campus/university/high school and maybe create a school of engineering, a liberal arts school, a law school, a dining hall, and so forth, but then allow the SNS to find itself.

To allow the SNS and its members to find their own voice, their own interests, and their own passions – which may well be very different from what is first assumed by the creator. Google gets this, though not yet within the construct of the SNS’s. What Google did do successfully was to buy USENET – the original newsgroups – and then build an superstructure on top of that – make it modern, sustainable, durable, and more readable.

Google returned USENET to relevance in a world that considered newsgroups and IRC to be dead or dying. Each and every one of communities on USENET is amazingly vertical, but they could all back up and back out to the larger USENET community – to the equivalent of the “welcome new students??? meetings and gatherings colleges offer to entering Freshmen.

Communities that are too vertical tend to shoe horn the “general topics??? conversations into hidden “off topic??? eddies. That is just the opposite of what should be done. The conversation should be general, cross-pollinating, and then move, after a conversation starts, into another room.

Start with an amazing platform, collect users, listen and watch them to see how they’re playing with the software application objects, widgets, and tools (are they playing with the toy or the box?), and then build for the users base, withholding judgment. Digg is a case study for this: start small, grow organically, and allow your members to find themselves.

The developers of Digg realized that after initial vertical growth based on the general members of Slashdot (techie, geeky, teens, boys), digg would suffer from the same sort of vulnerabilities that Slashdot suffered when Slashdot didn’t evolve and grow and broaden itself.

People love talking about Linux, but when happens when the Dow drops or the elections come? Where will the conversation happen? Where is the “kitchen??? at the party where every eventually goes to just talk about general interest stuff? Unless there are opportunities to express and share so-called “off-topic??? conversation right there, within the community in which members are already committed, with members to whom they’re already committed, then they are bound to go elsewhere.

Starting small and allowing the community to design itself is much different than starting big and losing one’s focus. Other mistakes happen when community builders make assumptions as to what participants, members, and lurkers want. Another mistake is putting a wall up around the community so that non-members cannot get a full feeling for the community from without.

The best SNS’s, virtual worlds, and online communities are honeypots. By honeypot, I am not suggesting, “a server that is configured to detect an intruder by mirroring a real production system. It appears as an ordinary server doing work, but all the data and transactions are phony. Located either in or outside the firewall, the honeypot is used to learn about an intruder’s techniques as well as determine vulnerabilities in the real system.” Although I am, sort of. The best SNS needs to be appealing, attractive, sweet, and compelling. Community-builders and SNS ASP developers need to be willing learn about member techniques, interests, processes, and needs, as well as determine “vulnerabilities” in the SNS platform that may repel, turn off, or limit the evolution and growth of the community.

To channel Chauncey Gardener for a second, one must do whatever one must to make sure that the earth in the garden is moist and well fed, one must seed well and completely, one must keep the garden in sun and water, one must encourage the garden to grow as it will for only in its growth will the garden be successful, and then, after rigorous growth, pruning and weeding must be done, only in order to allow the garden to be healthy, not to turn the garden into topiary. Okay, I am done.

Digg allows all of these things. Digg is perfectly useful and compelling even as an alien, but it is way more fun and interesting when you’re a citizen, that’s for sure. An SNS community needs to be as attractive as possible because exclusivity is no longer essential or even valuable. What is valuable is “useful,??? “interesting,??? and “authentic.??? They also have to have community buy-in and the best enjoy a certain fanatical devotion. Just like the best Universities and Colleges.

And Digg allowed its member to tell it when it was time to evolve past tech and geek news. Digg did not limit its scope or define itself too tightly with being “gear for geeks??? or “news for nerds.??? That would have ultimately been the death of Digg.

What the best Universities (such as Yale) understand is that it is not the student who is blessed and honored by being accepted by a top college (Yale College) but rather it is the college that should be blessed and honored (and should be grateful) that such a quality student is accepting its offers and actually attending – choosing – their particular school: Yale instead of Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, etc…

Harvard, too, is aware that although in the short-term Harvard makes the Harvard Man, over the long term, it is Harvard Men who made Harvard and continue to make Harvard. “Who have you graduated recently???? Unless the quality and character of its students and alumni remain top-drawer, Harvard is not guaranteed its position as “top three??? in USA Today alongside Princeton and Yale. No matter how grand its endowment.

So, Harvard and Yale spoil their students rotten! My friends who attended Harvard or Yale college swoon over those 4 years like I swoon over my first love.

Likewise, SNS’s, virtual worlds, and virtual communities need to realize that at any one point, their brand is only as good as the collective that is manifest in the users, the members, the lurkers, the stewards, and the alumni of the property.

This isn’t only true in SNS’s. The same thing can be said of the most successful message boards and online communities. The most important distinction, I think, is that all of these “rooms” and all of these “clubs” and all of these spaces where (and are) defined and created by the communities themselves. Sui generis. And this sort of ownership – “for us by us,??? as the slogan goes over as Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community – should never be underestimated.

The Well has Howard Rheingold as a member and alumnus, for example, and the credibility of all that he has made and done; over time, more and more virtual communities, virtual worlds, and SNS will be known for their members as well: who studies, who studied, and who wants to join.

“What’s in it for me??? (WIIFM) and the concept of pride of ownership are important – essential – ingredients of a sustainable, deep, thriving, and healthy community. The success of MySpace and of Facebook is that the verticals are not (were not) defined for them by their grand architects – they are self-creating, self-forming, and also self-destructing. They form, reform, mutate and disperse after they hit a limit of general conversation and then either break off and reform into an “interest group” or “club” or they self-check and work to “get back on topic.”

SNS’s and communities in general tend to be formed in one of two ways: like Paris or like London. Intelligence Design (architecture) or Emergent Design. The later never looks very beautiful or the way people – or the creators, investors, and architects – expect (or want) it to look, because investors and designers tend to not be able to control it – and when they do try to impost order, often in a heavy-handed way, they also tend to scare off all of their members, too.

This organic revolution has proven its success online time and time again. The Internet does not respond (well or at all) to command and control. The smartest Web 2.0 platforms allow the “masses of asses” (yes, the customer; yes, us) to define the platform and the experience – their own and collective environment and experience.

MySpace does this amazingly well and so does Facebook. Until recently, Friendster suffered from a vision and used command and control tactics to try to coerce its users that “it didn’t really want to do things that way??? and Friendster members abandoned in droves to platforms and experiences not so monitored by “mom and dad.???

A command and control grand vision doesn’t work when you develop an environment that needs to be truly both attractive and compelling much more than it needs to be informational or instructional. An SNS needs to be attractive, diversional, compelling, amusing, and entertaining – never limiting.

My analogy of college and high school never mentioned classrooms or classes for training or learning. People do enough of that at school and at work. An SNS needs to give its users a university campus without any expectations or concepts of dropping out, getting judged, doing homework, or being held accountable for anything.

A good SNS should be all late-night wine-influenced discussions of Descartes and Plato and the summer afternoons on the quad and the time playing Xbox with your roommates.

When I go onto my long-term online communities, the Well, The Meta Network, USENET, and Brainstorms, there are many very deep and very vertical communities, discussing things as frivolous as fashion and video games and as deep as how to survive cancer, how to get a post doc grant, and very deep discussions on “spirit,” “chaos theory,” and “world politics.”

What makes this amazing and sustainable is that there are an infinite number of ways to get along, to move into a space of intense conversation, and then to pull back into common areas, just to see who’s around. In a university setting, this could be the dining hall, the quad, the commons, etc. These spaces are very important.

If you think about all of this in terms of evolution, then we can think about the way things evolve in the most perverse ways when isolated from others of its kinds. So, if there are impervious walls – gaps or voids, mountains or ridges – between these vertical markets, SNS’s, and communities, then there may be an initial success, but there can also be a terrible volatility. One plague or drought can decimate a population completely.

Having a commons allows members and visitors to have a place to meet new people, have new experiences, and learn of new clubs, new opportunities, and new places – inbreeding versus crossbreeding. Ultimately, a diversity of visitors helps build a more resilient, invested, and self-identifing community. They will become “students for life??? at best and proud alums at worst. They will carry the brand awareness, even if their lives become too busy to participate any more.

They will become life long brand ambassadors for your community. Proud alumni.

And, in terms of “viral marketing,” it is also important when it comes to a member of an SNS “inviting his friends” – not all of my friends have the same vertical interests that I do… They could have very different interests – but as I explore the “commons” of an SNS, I can note that there are things happening online that “friend x” and “friend y” would love, and that would be my incentive to invite them on board.

Boompa? I am the only person I know in my entire community – that is not true, my buddy has an Audi S4 – who is into cars. My buddy is an Audi driver and I am a BMW driver. Does that mean we’re both drivers? Does that mean we love cars or our particular car? Do we cross over on performance sedans? On German cars? On luxury cars?

You have to offer the tools to allow the market to choose for itself, otherwise, you might never find out that the SNS needs all three, or none at all.

A “Modularized SNS” should be neutral like a university (unlike MySpace, which is pretty pre-defined as to what the demographic is), and there are lots of “vertical niche SNS’s” (e.g. car enthusiasts, gourmet cooking, travel, Rolex fans, Republican politicos, etc.) That way, everyone can form a SNS experience that actually fits them by modularly assembling the groups of people who have similar interests, (not just friends-in-common!)

I am a feminist. I studied postmodern feminist theory at Uni and felt confident that the progress and passion behind feminism offered by deconstructionism — the cultural and linguistic tools a women would need to redefine her story and her self — would result in a female self-empowerment much more substantial than the hyper-sexual self-objectification of Manolo Blahnik feminism. I am not the only one asking the question, “What Ever Happened to Feminism?” Check out Body Politic by Ingrid Sischy from the T Style Magazine (yes, I read it).

“Body Politic
By INGRID SISCHY
Published: February 25, 2007Last fall I was stopped in my tracks as I walked into a show in Milan during the collections, and a male friend, who’d just witnessed the same debacle that I had, raised his eyebrows and asked, “What happened to feminism???? It’s a question that is being asked repeatedly these days, and for good reason. The only word for the fashion collection we’d just seen was “bimbo??? — clothes put out on the runway without irony, without quotation marks, without any raison d’être other than saving money on material. Over the course of the next two weeks I gave myself a little assignment. I’d watch the runways in Milan and Paris and check off those clothes that signified a throwback to the long past of objectifying women. And on the other hand I’d put a little star down when the designer seemed to be wanting to take us into the future with a view of women that reflected self-possession.

Good thing I still like swings. Of course there were exceptions, designers who were true to the present, but by and large it was backward and forward and backward and forward. Then there were the designers who left earth entirely and showed a universe of female droids and cyborgs. These were the ones who, intentionally or not, illuminated the big challenge facing women’s fashion, best described by tweaking the famous tag line from “Star Trek???: women’s fashion, the final frontier . . . to boldly go where no one has gone before.

That’s easier said than done. As Miuccia Prada said to me, “The problem with new ideas about feminism is that there has been so little public discussion of the subject.??? Well, that’s changing, big time — if not in fashion at least in the art world, which has historically been the first place where a new perspective begins. In fact, after it seemed as though the subject of feminism had been put on simmer, the art world is cooking with gas again, not just for a new generation of feminist artists but in retrospect too. The year started out with a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, once such a perfect target for feminist critics, who felt it was stuck in the Stone Age as far as the representation of women goes. Now there are bicoastal extravaganzas planned for this spring: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will stage “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution??? from March 4 to July 16, and the Brooklyn Museum opens “Global Feminisms??? on March 23. The show celebrates a new center for feminist art, anchored by the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s famous “The Dinner Party.??? How these exhibitions will loop back to fashion and the creative/commercial balancing act that designers have to do is anybody’s guess, but bets are that there will be a trickle-down effect, as there often is.

What’s interesting is that if one goes through the iconic works of the first, second and third waves of feminist writers, there is so little that actually addresses fashion. Rereading Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin and so many others, I was struck by the dearth of attention to this subject, which after all has everything to do with how identity is constructed for the outside world. There’s no lack of thinking when it comes to inner life, working life, creative life and public life, but when fashion comes up, the attitude tends to be knee-jerk and programmatic. Take Greer’s climactic moment at the end of “The Female Eunuch,??? where she creates a sort of bill of rights, inciting women to: “. . . refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveliness.??? In fact some of the most powerful, liberated women I know choose to hobble around in the craziest skyscraper shoes. “The higher the heel,??? they say, “the better I feel.???

But the other part of Greer’s declaration — that women have the right to control their own bodies — is as resonant today as it was when she wrote it nearly 40 years ago. One can see that drama being played out in the fashion arena right now, with the debate over skinny models brought to a head by the deaths last fall of two South American catwalkers from complications of anorexia. The hysteria that resulted led to a spectacle of ignorance, hypocrisy and bureaucracy. If the issue weren’t so serious, some of the solutions proposed by bureaucrats — like models being weighed in like boxers or jockeys — would be funny. But unfortunately they don’t just infringe on everything that we are supposed to hold dear in the department of human liberties, they also display so little understanding of the disease they are trying to combat that it is frightening. So is the tendency to lump together girls who are naturally skinny with those who are sick, two very different realities. Hey, as someone who likes her fries, I’m all for bringing back a Rubenesque shape as the height of fashion, but the fact is that perceptions of beauty cannot, and will not, be dictated by laws. That’s where consciousness comes in. At the center of it all, for anorexics, but also for each of us, lies the issue of control, or as Barbara Kruger wrote in one of her most unforgettable artworks: “Your body is a battleground.??? Hopefully you win.”

Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choo’s

I call the new feminism Manolo Blahnik Feminism, which is a super-sexual, super-sexy, and super-confusing form of self-empowerment. Ariel Levy calls it “raunch culture” and I believe that it is going to blow up in American women’s faces.

I believe very strongly that there are too many dangerous contradiction in the new feminism, in the new American woman.

I attended a panel on gender differences in the new feminism and my question to the panel was, “I understand how empowering strappy stilettos, butt jeans, bare bellies, and camisole tops are for the modern woman. It is all about taking back the sex, taking back the gaze, reclaiming the control of what is cute, what is hot, what is sexy, it about taking back control, reclaiming feelings of pride in the body, pride in the shape and tan earned from an active, outdoorsy life. That’s all fine and good. Unfortunately, we men never got the memo. I never got the memo.”

In fact, I feel sort of like a fox in a hen house. Why? Well, all of my old-world, unenlightened, seduction techniques work now better than ever! In fact, the truth is, I am really too nice for the Manolo Blahnik k feminist.

The Manolo Blahnik feminist wants to be taken, wants to find a real man, wants to take risks and have a great time; she pursues a doctrine of devil may care.

Well, no matter what the Manolo Blahnik Feminist thinks she wants and no matter what she thinks she’s doing, she is actually walking into a very dangerous trap.

We men are not responding to this self-empowerment with amazement and respect, we’re responding to it by licking our lips, by taking advantage, by rubbing our hands together, and by trying not to jinx this out of being. We are pretty well convinced that what is happening won’t last: the Manolo Blahnik feminist fancies herself the aggressor, the buyer, the pursuer, the seducer. And we men are what she is after.

All we see is, “man that girl is fine — I’d like some of that.”

As men in such a seller’s market, we don’t have to choose. We can date another willing girl every night. We can push sex much faster than we ever could believe. The three-date rule? Ha! That’s the official rule, but now the first date counts from the night we first met. Oral sex on the first date has sort of become de rigueur — if you want a second date.

Instead of getting control, the Manolo Blahnik Feminist has relinquished control to us men.

And even worse, this is a very dangerous game. We men are bigger, stronger, and not all of us are so nice. I personally have a lot of experience with women who are survivors — survivors not just of dating or their 20s, but survivors of sexual abuse and rape.

I have loved them, I have befriended them, and I worked through relationships with women who have survived sexual abuse and rape.

Its always an ugly story and the world is never the same. We just have not received the memo. This kind of exciting, naughty, passionate, irresponsible, reckless indulgence in “raunch culture” is going to result in one hell of a cultural hangover.

Many women will be unable to recover from this self-indulgence with any semblance of faith, trust, hope, or intactness.

And many men, too.

When it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?

Not I.

I am not sure if modern women have it very good. Not nearly as good as would be expected. I attended college at a high point for feminism an academia, when a woman would still identify with being a feminist.

Not any more.

Not Liberating, After All
How did feminists end up in bed with Hugh Hefner?

BY WENDY SHALIT
Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Ariel Levy attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, and she doesn’t feel the better for it. It was a place where “group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was de rigueur.” It was a place where they had “coed showers, on principle.” When Ms. Levy suggested to a department head that it would be nice to have at least one course in the traditional literary canon, she was dismissed with icy contempt. Yet elsewhere on campus a professor of the humanities taught a course on pornography featuring, um, detailed textual analysis.

It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn’t, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls “raunch culture,” now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with “Porn Star” across the chest. Teen stores sell “Cat in the Hat” thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters’ friends to “cardio striptease” classes for birthday parties. This is liberation?

Ms. Levy is baffled. “Why,” she wondered, “is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering?” Why did female Olympic athletes pose for Playboy before the summer 2004 Games? Why did Katie Couric feel the need to point to her cleavage and gush “these are actually real!” when she guest-hosted “The Tonight Show” a couple of years ago?

Some sort of pervasive pressure, apparently, requires “everyone who is sexually liberated . . . to be imitating strippers and porn stars.” Ms. Levy describes the perfect distillation of this impulse–a social group called CAKE that hosts steamy, hooking-up parties in New York and London. CAKE makes big bucks advertising “feminism in action”–it claims to be the place where “sexual equality and feminism finally meet”–but its events are indistinguishable from those held at the Playboy Mansion.

The surface logic of such conduct is fairly simple, notes Ms. Levy. “Women had come so far,” or so the thinking went, that “we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny.” If male chauvinist pigs “regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.”

Well, Ms. Levy is having none of it, and she is not the only one. Even Erica Jong seems to feel that something has gone wrong. Known for popularizing the idea that a woman may want consequence-free sex, Ms. Jong today declares: “Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don’t love . . . that is not liberation.” It isn’t? Someone should tell this to Annie, a blue-eyed 29-year-old who admits to Ms. Levy that she “used to get so hurt” after a night of sex that didn’t yield an emotional bond. Now she has gotten over it, or tried to: “I’m like a guy,” she brags.

How did this happen? Why did feminism sell its soul to the sexual-liberation movement in the first place? After all, the original feminists were fighting to be taken seriously. Hugh Hefner, by contrast, said that his ideal girl “resembles a bunny . . . vivacious, jumping–sexy.” There seems to be a contradiction here.

Ms. Levy’s answer is that, after a brief and failed fight against pornography, feminism joined forces with Hef & Co. to fight for abortion rights. This is a plausible explanation, as far as it goes. Abortion has indeed assumed a primary importance in both feminist “rights” thinking and in the whole culture of soft-core libertinism: Mr. Hefner is a big fan of abortion, for obvious reasons.

But something else may be going on. Feminism grounded itself, in its early days, in the idea that there were no differences between the sexes. A girl wanting to keep her virginity was bad, for sexual reticence amounted to asserting a separate standard, a Victorian one at that. To Hef, modesty was a “hang-up,” and to the feminists it was a “patriarchal construct.” Ms. Levy believes that feminism was on the right track but then veered off-course: “What has moved into feminism’s place . . . is an almost opposite style, attitude, and set of principles.”

But maybe feminism’s foundations were weak from the start. Everyone in Ms. Levy’s book–whether it’s middle-class girls who feel anxiety about appearing “hot” or grown women who confess to Ms. Levy that “accumulating sex for its own sake . . . is not that sexual”–shows that a woman’s experience of sex and love is very different from that of an adolescent boy or a man. Indeed, the more a woman imitates a man, the clearer these differences become.

Paris Hilton tells Rolling Stone: “My boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual.” (Ms. Levy reports that on one of the infamous videotapes she takes a cellphone call during intercourse.) Plainly, the sexual revolution has not brought fulfillment for women. Even its mascots experience boredom, and for the civilians there is distress and heartache.

It may be that, like Ms. Levy, a lot of feminists now regret getting in bed with Mr. Hefner. Yet if you mention the word “modesty” within 20 feet of them their heads spin around like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” This is where they get stuck. Only if feminism can embrace the more traditional ways that men and women have courted throughout the ages can it have anything practical to offer young women. To the extent that feminists dismiss as worthless anything that is perceived as “backtracking,” they only help to perpetuate the “raunch culture”–even as they deplore its effects.

Take a beach scene that Ms. Levy recounts, when the male “friends” of two girls pressure them to take off their suits. Soon surrounded by a circle of 40 screaming men, the girls say “no way!” but eventually give in and spank each other to appease the crowd.

Such a girl requires, in addition to perhaps Mace, a compelling alternative to the Female Chauvinist Pig. Otherwise she may well give in to social pressure–not to mention professorial nonsense–and then wonder what’s wrong with her when she is not happy with the pig in her bed or the pig she has become.

Ms. Shalit is author of “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.” You can buy “Female Chauvinist Pigs” from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

September 20, 2005

Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ex=1127966400&en=3f7348e314a603ee&ei=5070&emc=eta1

By LOUISE STORY

Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: smart (1510 SAT), disciplined (4.0 grade point average), competitive (finalist in Texas oratory competition), musical (pianist), athletic (runner) and altruistic (hospital volunteer). And at the start of her sophomore year at Yale, Ms. Liu is full of ambition, planning to go to law school.

So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom.

“My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time,” Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. “You always have to choose one over the other.”

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.

Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

“At the height of the women’s movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing,” said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. “The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”

Dr. Russett is among more than a dozen faculty members and administrators at the most exclusive institutions who have been on campus for decades and who said in interviews that they had noticed the changing attitude.

Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.

“Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all,” said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.

“Men really aren’t put in that position,” she said.

Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at least until they are in school.

“I’ve seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn’t, and it’s kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it,” said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until Ms. Abugo was in first grade.

While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.

The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.

Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.

The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.

In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni – both men and women – to play in society.

For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: “The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word ‘leadership’ conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.’s, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader than that.”

She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where students could become leaders.

In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: “There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities.”

Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.

“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person’s expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students’ minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

“What does concern me,” said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, “is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”

There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children.

According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity – a gap that was small among alumni in their 20′s but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40′s, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.

A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40′s, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40′s, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.

A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30′s and 40′s.

What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.

“It never occurred to me,” Rebecca W. Bushnell, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said about working versus raising children. “Thirty years ago when I was heading out, I guess I was just taking it one step at a time.”

Dr. Bushnell said young women today, in contrast, are thinking and talking about part-time or flexible work options for when they have children. “People have a heightened awareness of trying to get the right balance between work and family.”

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women’s plans to stay home with their children.

“A lot of the guys were like, ‘I think that’s really great,’ ” Ms. Currie said. “One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’ Staying at home with your children isn’t as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30′s now.”

For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.

“My stepmom’s very proud of my choice because it makes her feel more valuable,” said Kellie Zesch, a Texan who graduated from the University of North Carolina two years ago and who said that once she had children, she intended to stay home for at least five years and then consider working part time. “It justified it to her, that I don’t look down on her for not having a career.”

Similarly, students who are committed to full-time careers, without breaks, also cited their mothers as influences. Laura Sullivan, a sophomore at Yale who wants to be a lawyer, called her mother’s choice to work full time the “greatest gift.”

“She showed me what it meant to be an amazing mother and maintain a career,” Ms. Sullivan said.

Some of these women’s mothers, who said they did not think about these issues so early in their lives, said they were surprised to hear that their college-age daughters had already formed their plans.

Emily Lechner, one of Ms. Liu’s roommates, hopes to stay home a few years, then work part time as a lawyer once her children are in school.

Her mother, Carol, who once thought she would have a full-time career but gave it up when her children were born, was pleasantly surprised to hear that. “I do have this bias that the parents can do it best,” she said. “I see a lot of women in their 30′s who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best.”

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation’s top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

“I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler added, “that this would be solved by now.”

Angie Ku, another of Ms. Liu’s roommates who had a stay-at-home mom, talks nonchalantly about attending law or business school, having perhaps a 10-year career and then staying home with her children.

“Parents have such an influence on their children,” Ms. Ku said. “I want to have that influence. Me!”

She said she did not mind if that limited her career potential.

“I’ll have a career until I have two kids,” she said. “It doesn’t necessarily matter how far you get. It’s kind of like the experience: I have tried what I wanted to do.”

Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

“I accept things how they are,” she said. “I don’t mind the status quo. I don’t see why I have to go against it.”

After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.

“It worked so well for me,” she said, “and I don’t see in my life why it wouldn’t work.”

Thanks to Carrie for sending me this article.

My dear friend commented on this part of the article, “And when it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?”

Her response was, “….Therein lies the pitfall…. Once you start tasting of that forbidden apple, the garden of romance can all too easily dissapear! This, i think, is why many parents of our generation divorced — lack of faith in love is a direct result of the “free love” movement. Someone needs to warn the young!!! They need to be made aware of the booby-traps. Otherwise we are all just walking around with broken flowers, feeling numb to the pain we don’t even realize we are entitled to have.”

Actual Nelson Mandela Inaugural Speech:

Date: 09 May 1994
Title: MANDELA: INAUGURATION ADDRESS, CAPE TOWN
——————————————————————————–
NELSON MANDELA’S ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF CAPE TOWN, GRAND PARADE, ON THE OCCASION OF HIS INAUGURATION AS STATE PRESIDENT, 9 MAY 1994

Mr Master of Ceremonies,
Your Excellencies,
Members of the Diplomatic Corps,
My Fellow South Africans:

Today we are entering a new era for our country and its people. Today we celebrate not the victory of a party, but a victory for all the people of South Africa.

Our country has arrived at a decision. Among all the parties that contested the elections, the overwhelming majority of South Africans have mandated the African National Congress to lead our country into the future. The South Africa we have struggled for, in which all our people, be they African, Coloured, Indian or White, regard themselves as citizens of one nation is at hand.

Perhaps it was history that ordained that it be here, at the Cape of Good Hope that we should lay the foundation stone of our new nation. For it was here at this Cape, over three countries ago, that there began the fateful convergence of the peoples of Africa, Europe and Asia on these shores.

It was to this peninsula that the patriots, among them many princes and scholars, of Indonesia were dragged in chains. It was on the sandy plains of this peninsula that first battles of the epic wars of resistance were fought.

When we look out across Table Bay, the horizon is dominated by Robben Island, whose infamy as a dungeon built to stifle the spirit of freedom is as old as colonialism in South Africa. For three centuries that island was seen as a place to which outcasts can be banished. The names of those who were incarcerated on Robben Island is a roll call of resistance fighters and democrats spanning over three centuries. If indeed this is a Cape of Good Hope, that hope owes much to the spirit of that legion of fighters and others of their calibre.

We have fought for a democratic constitution since the 1880s. Ours has been a quest for a constitution freely adopted by the people of South Africa, reflecting their wishes and their aspirations. The struggle for democracy has never been a matter pursued by one race, class, religious community or gender among South Africans. In honouring those who fought to see this day arrive, we honour the best sons and daughters of all our people. We can count amongst them Africans, Coloureds, Whites, Indians, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews – all of them united by a common vision of a better life for the people of this country.

It was that vision that inspired us in 1923 when we adopted the first ever Bill of Rights in this country. That same vision spurred us to put forward the African Claims in 1946. It is also the founding principle of the Freedom Charter we adopted as policy in 1955, which in its very first lines, places before South Africa an inclusive basis for citizenship.

In the 1980s the African National Congress was still setting the pace, being the first major political formation in South Africa to commit itself firmly to a Bill of Rights, which we published in November 1990. These milestones give concrete expression to what South Africa can become. They speak of a constitutional, democratic, political order in which, regardless of colour, gender, religion, political opinion or sexual orientation, the law will provide for the equal protection of all citizens.

They project a democracy in which the government, whomever that government may be, will be bound by a higher set of rules, embodied in a constitution, and will not be able govern the country as it pleases.

Democracy is based on the majority principle. This is especially true in a country such as ours where the vast majority have been systematically denied their rights. At the same time, democracy also requires that the rights of political and other minorities be safeguarded.

In the political order we have established there will regular, open and free elections, at all levels of government – central, provincial and municipal. There shall also be a social order which respects completely the culture, language and religious rights of all sections of our society and the fundamental rights of the individual.

The task at hand on will not be easy. But you have mandated us to change South Africa from a country in which the majority lived with little hope, to one in which they can live and work with dignity, with a sense of self-esteem and confidence in the future. The cornerstone of building a better life of opportunity, freedom and prosperity is the Reconstruction and Development Programme.

This needs unity of purpose. It needs in action. It requires us all to work together to bring an end to division, an end to suspicion and build a nation united in our diversity.

The people of South Africa have spoken in these elections. They want change! And change is what they will get. Our plan is to create jobs, promote peace and reconciliation, and to guarantee freedom for all South Africans. We will tackle the widespread poverty so pervasive among the majority of our people. By encouraging investors and the democratic state to support job creating projects in which manufacturing will play a central role we will try to change our country from a net exporter of raw material to one that exports finished products through beneficiation.

The government will devise policies that encourage and reward productive enterprise among the disadvantaged communities – African, Coloured and Indian. By easing credit conditions we can assist them to make inroads into the productive and manufacturing spheres and breakout of the small-scale distribution to which they are presently confined.

To raise our country and its people from the morass of racism and apartheid will require determination and effort. As a government, the ANC will create a legal framework that will assist, rather than impede, the awesome task of reconstruction and development of our battered society.

While we are and shall remain fully committed to the spirit of a government of national unity, we are determined to initiate and bring about the change that our mandate from the people demands.

We place our vision of a new constitutional order for South Africa on the table not as conquerors, prescribing to the conquered. We speak as fellow citizens to heal the wounds of the past with the intent of constructing a new order based on justice for all.

This is the challenge that faces all South Africans today, and it is one to which I am certain we will all rise.

Issued by: ANC, Department of Information and Publicity, Johannesburg.