Diplomacy
for release 08-09-06
Washington DC
Benjamin Franklin is my guide and spiritual mentor. He invented the lightning rod, after all. And I know that his cuddly, grandmotherly portrait is one of the reasons why I'm so fond of hundred dollar bills.
Franklin was the Bill Gates of his day, a technological revolutionary. We need Ben Franklin right now. We need his inventiveness, his enlightenment and most of all we need his diplomacy.
For all of my affection for Condi Rice, she is about as diplomatic as a Darth Vader dominatrix. She needs one of those little plastic Klingon foreheads. Then she would really be convincing.
Contrary to the actions of our president, diplomacy is a more refined procedure than talking to Tony Blair over your shoulder with a mouth full of food and saying that Syria and Hezbollah need to, 'stop doing that shit, and it's over.'
And you don't start diplomacy off with the phrase, "what you need to understand is...blah, blah." This is standard parlance for our government. How many times have you heard Bush or Rice or Cheney preface a statement with this clause? "What the American people need to understand....or, What the Iranians need to understand...etc.) The practical translation of this expression is, "you have to see it my way." It represents an authoritarian mindset. It is not diplomacy.
The difference between dictation and discourse is a simple turn of phrase.
Franklin's lightning rod is the perfect technological embodiment of diplomacy. The lightning rod mediates the forces between heaven and the earth, the positive and the negative. It is a receptive instrument, not a dictatorial one. It doesn't tell the energy in the clouds what it 'needs to understand.' It merely provides a safe route for lightning's inevitable journey to the ground. That's diplomacy.
Franklin also invented bifocal glasses, another embodiment of technical diplomacy. Bifocals allow us to view the world both close-up and at a distance. Given the number of short-sighted decisions made by this administration, I think they could use some bifocals. I wonder how Condi would look in a pair?
The war that we are witnessing between Israel and Hezbollah reminds me of a crude sports event. Daily, the scorecards reflect how many Katushkas hit Israel and how deep behind the line of scrimmage that the bombs have struck and how many innocent civilians are dead. And you can't really tell who is fighting with whom, there are so many proxies. Is this simply an ancestral fight between Judeo-Christians and Muslims, an atavistic battle between Isaac and Ishmael? Or is it a fight between Iran and the US with Hezbollah and Israel acting as proxies? Are the Lebanese just unlucky enough to be providing the stadium for this soccer game?
Who knows?
Ben Franklin would have known. He was a realist. He would have known that Hezbollah is not a terrorist group, but a Shia nationalist organization. They have hospitals and schools and community centers. They minister to the needs of their people. They are a grassroots organization and that's why they have grassroots support.
Franklin also proposed the idea of daylight savings time. He was enlightened. He was thrifty. He wanted to use the natural light of day to its best advantage. It was a bold notion to shift the clock, to move time.
If old Ben were conducting diplomacy today he would probably have another bold notion. It might go something like this: Israel is a country in the Middle East. It has an area of slightly over 20,000 sq km. and a population of six and a half million people. Its neighbors on all sides hate it and some have vowed its destruction. The existence of the Jewish state of Israel is the primary cause of tension in the Middle East. The Jews are a migratory people, they have experienced diasporas and exiles and captivities. Why not just give the Israelis a quarter of the state of Wyoming? They would get mobetta land and not have to face hostile neighbors. They could roam and raise sheep just like Abraham did. Then we could just watch the Sunnis and the Shia fight it out.
The Poet's Ear hears the angelic strains of the glass armonica, Franklins greatest invention. The music of the spheres. Perfect harmony. Diplomacy.
"Of all my inventions, the glass armonica has given me the greatest personal satisfaction." – Benjamin Franklin
