Moving from Nine to Two Lanes at the Holland Tunnel: Diplomacy

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“Beyond the ‘hugging,’ I recommend my own version of ‘shuttle diplomacy.’ Instead of a diplomat flying back and forth between, say, Jerusalem and Tehran, I’d put some representative Jews and Arabs in one of NASA’s old shuttles and send them into orbit above Earth’s weather. Acquiring what Edgar Mitchell called ‘instant global consciousness’ might lead the two camps to common ground.”—By Skip Eisiminger

“All war represents a failure of diplomacy.”—Tony Benn

“All diplomacy is a continuation of war.”—Zhou Enlai

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—4/21/2014—Martin Luther King had the courage and composure to tickle the lion behind its ears when his head was in its mouth. Diplomats like him have labored to appease Hitler, bowed at the proper angle in Japan, and improvised for the Japanese à la Dizzy Gillespie wailing on a bamboo flute. They are gifted individuals who can play the bagpipes but don’t say “Nice doggie” while eyeing a rock, round a square table, or tell their foreign counterparts to go to hell in a way that makes them look forward to the trip. They are masters of thinking twice before saying nothing, rubbing out another’s mistake instead of rubbing it in, and making a point without drawing blood. These blessed peacekeepers declare war in the politest terms, think twice before saying nothing, or yawn with their mouths closed.

My mother, however, was not a diplomat. She was the hen who not only knew when the sun rose, she announced its rising. After a minor stroke at mid-life when her mother died, she soured on life and failed the test of leaving unsaid the wrong thing at the right moment. When her sister confided that her husband was dying of liver cancer, Mother said, “Well thank heaven Butch [her husband] is in good health.” When I told Mother that my wife called her mother every Wednesday morning despite the fact that my mother-in-law did not recognize her daughter, Mother said, “Well, why does she call?” And when my wife sent Mother a Christmas stollen she’d baked, Mother told us over the phone, “It wasn’t fit to eat, so I threw it out.” A simple lie would have been ever more diplomatic, but Mother did not have it in her.

As undiplomatic as Mother could be, her callousness seldom went beyond the family unlike three bosses I know of but wish I didn’t. The first was a friend’s boss who called his workers into his office one morning, announced he had “a cash-flow problem,” and fired four people. Later the same day, as one sacked individual was packing a few personal items into his Tercel, the boss drove up in the company parking lot in a red BMW and yelled, “Hey, Warren, check out my new Beemer!”

The second reprobate was my wife’s former boss, the manager of the local university food service with two cafeterias that I’ll call “Red” and “Blue.” One fall, the manager at “Red” hired a young man to serve as his assistant at “Blue” and his new bride to be the bookkeeper at “Red.” A few weeks later, the manager realized neither of his new hires was working out, so he transferred the husband to “Red,” where his first assignment was to fire his wife. When he refused, the boss hired someone else without telling his assistant or his bookkeeper. When the couple came to work the next morning, they found a new employee working at the wife’s desk.

And the third scapegrace personally invited another friend to fly down from New York to be interviewed for a job in Columbia, South Carolina. After the president of the company spent 45 minutes of the hour-long interview talking about himself, he said he’d be in touch. The candidate wrote a thank-you card and, after the deadline for applications had passed, she called three times to check on her status only to be told, “The boss is not in.” When she finally reached him, he said, “Oh, I gave that job to someone with far more qualifications than you have.”

My father, who put in 28 years of contentious service in the Army and 66 years of contentious marriage to my mother, often said that “peace lies between the colonel’s crease and the civilian’s wrinkle.”

Among my favorite “wrinkled” compromises is the English home built about 1800 with a Classical front and a Gothic rear.

This is followed by the argument over the world’s fastest human—the record holder at 200-meters or 100-meters—which was settled by a race over 150-meters.

The charge that a Jamaican beauty contest in 1950 was marred by racial prejudice was diplomatically resolved by naming ten winners based on differing skin tone.

And when Augustus Caesar complained that Julius had been assigned a month on the new calendar with 31 days, Augustus was told, “But of course, sire, 31 days hath Augustus.”

When the Clemson (University) Tigers were scheduled to play the Auburn Tigers, one of my students asked me who I was pulling for in a game which matched my alma mater against the school that employed me. I said, “I’m going to sit in the end zone and yell, ‘Go Tigers!’” I didn’t tell him this, but I’m a veteran with three years’ experience “reading the enemy’s mail” as someone called the intelligence business. My army friends and I lived and worked within a kilometer of the old East German border, and if the Russian Army had decided to cross it, our Bahrdorf listening post on “Gallow’s Hill” would have been ground meat in short order. So, I’ve long appreciated the diplomatic work that kept us out of World War III while Cuba was being armed with Russian rockets and East Germany was being walled off from the free world.

And yet with 75 wars in the 19th century and 150 in the 20th, I often wonder how well the diplomatic corps is doing? It’s never been larger or more active, but it’s never had more unpaid parking tickets, and the failures from Bosnia, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Ukraine have dominated the headlines for decades.

Due to the failures of diplomatic ostracism, I’m a proponent of what has been called “the fatal hug,” a figurative embrace of Fidel Castro and his ilk. As Time’s Joe Klein says, once the embrace has been announced, we send a letter stating, “We’re naming an ambassador. We’re lifting the embargo. We’re going to let our companies sell you all sorts of cool American things . . . . This doesn’t mean we approve of your way of running your country, but it’s silly for us to deny that you’re in charge . . . for now.” As some foreign policy experts speculate, with 60 years of hindsight, had we recognized China in the 1950s, we might have avoided the Viet Nam War by giving the Chinese people someone other than us to demonize.

Beyond the “hugging,” I recommend my own version of “shuttle diplomacy.”

Instead of a diplomat flying back and forth between, say, Jerusalem and Tehran, I’d put some representative Jews and Arabs in one of NASA’s old shuttles and send them into orbit above Earth’s weather. Acquiring what Edgar Mitchell called “instant global consciousness” might lead the two camps to common ground. It’s worked for every astronaut who’s ever flown.

Though it’s too late for my mother and one of the bosses above, why not forge statesmen from politicians?

Note: The image used to illustrate this column derives from http://gigaom.com/2014/04/02/nasa-limits-contact-with-russian-federal-space-agency/.

Also of great interest to readers of Skip Eisiminger: the author’s latest book, a collection of his Weekly Hubris (among many other) essays, Letters to the Grandchildren, has just been released by Clemson University Digital Press. To order copies, contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522 (also, an order form is available online at http://www.clemson.edu/cedp/cudp).