One Man Speaks Out as Many Listen

The most remarkable move in a series of remarkable moves by our new President to date was his decision to sit down today for his very first television interview not with one of the big American networks but with an Arab station.

In a message that surely is being wisely distributed throughout the Muslim world tonight, President Obama is reaching out to people on the basis of shared values, as opposed to Bush's rhetoric about a Crusades between civilizations.

This will not in any way diminish the difficulty of brokering peace in the Middle East, for example, or of solving our difficult breach with Iran. But, he may be able to further isolate al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist elements from the broad mainstream of modern Islamic culture. If so, he will have made our world a much safer place.

The hateful gap between the West and Islam is not preordained. Obama's understanding of this historic opportunity presages an administration that may be able to mend ancient wounds, and push former enemies into the common search for a peaceful future.

Idealistic? Perhaps so. But troubled times demand great leaders, and I suspect we have one in Barack Obama. God knows, we need one.

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Jagged Edges

We have lots of friends here, many of whom, admittedly, are fictional, like this sweet fellow. Which raises the issue of where the line between fiction and non-fiction resides. Not to mention how to delineate the far more confusing connection between dreams and real life.

My 14-year-old had a dream last night. In his dream, I was dying and in a lot of pain. His Mom, my ex-wife, made a decision to put me out of my misery by slitting my throat. But she did so in such a way that no blood appeared, in his dream, and that helped me, because I professed that I suddenly felt much better.

Nevertheless, her method proved effective, because as he checked my pulse, it faded away to nothingness, so he knew that I indeed was dead. His overwhelming sense of sadness at losing his Dad woke him up, whereupon he discovered it was all only a dream.

Meanwhile, in my bed, I was having my own dream. In it, my parents were still alive, which is always one of the most comforting yet unnerving aspects of any of my dreams. We were all staying in one of the houses I used to own, before I lost them all, but my parents were so very different from the way they actually were when alive.

My mother, for example, was having an affair with a guy in Florida, and couldn't wait to get back to him. My father was lying on the couch, gossiping with his girlfriend over the phone.

I was trying to sort all of this out when I awoke to the relief that none of this had actually happened, except, of course, that the dream represented a strange parallel with the experiences of my children, including my son who would soon be sharing his dream with me.

Thus, I realized, my dream had inserted me into his shoes (and those of all my other dear children). Okay. But, so far, I have not been able to figure what his dream meant. I'll tell you this much. My throat remains safe tonight, and whenever any ex-wives show up, I'll be sure to hide the sharp knives.

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The Silent Toll

Everywhere we gather, the conversation turns, among all the parents I know, to how are we possibly going to make it? Of course, the same question is being asked by those without kids, those with grown kids, those living alone or in couples.

The extent of the recession/depression is only slowly taking hold in our imaginations. As we pay the bills, watch our checking account balances shrink, and find no relevant job listings, it is starting to feel like this is the way it is going to be for a long time.



Around here, the parents of 14-year-olds worry about where our 8th graders will go to high school this fall. This, like many big cities, has lots of public high schools still, but most of them suck, big-time.

They are mired in constant budget cuts, layoffs, and trying to serve students, most of whom speak English, if at all, as a second language, and who have had few of the advantages middle-class bestow on their kids -- especially when it comes to education.

There are excellent private schools here, but they charge tuition that is greater than the maximum unemployment benefit offered by the state.

The other day, one parent of school-aged kids I know had his first doctor's appointment in over three years. He's been employed about three-quarters of that time, but in jobs where to take time to visit a doctor required him to file a PTO (Paid Time Off) forms.

This, of course, drew down on his already miniscule vacation balance (new employees always get the minimum benefits, even if like him, he's in his 60s and deeply experienced in his field.) And he really wanted to save those few vacation days to spend with his kids over summer vacation.

During the unemployed periods, he couldn't go to the doctor because of the loss of affordable health insurance benefits. This guy has just gotten laid off again, but this time, he got so sick he really had to go the doctor.

"Shame on you!" the doctor's assistant told him when he showed up for his appointment.

"What did you find out," I asked him.

"The doc says I have high blood pressure -- very high."

I cannot begin to imagine why...

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Inside this teahouse in Kabul, men gathered to watch the Obama Inauguration. These places remain unchanged from when I was last there 38 years ago. Men, and only men, gather in these joints, heated by wood-burning stoves, where the drink of choice is hot tea, sweetened, and the talk ranges across all things local -- or at most, regional.

That is how it was four decades ago.

Now, there is a TV, which in this shot, has captured all eyes in the house. When I lived in Afghanistan, there were no TV's.

And now, also, Afghans, like Iowans, no longer have the luxury of contemplating only their local environment. Like all of us, they are part of a global economy.

The Afghans' main exports, to date, have been terrorism and opium. In this context, I can understand if most Westerners feel like hating all Afghans, as ignorant, violent primitives all too willing to die in the name of Allah than to do anything productive with their lives.

But I've known another kind of Afghan, albeit in a time when our world was not so polarized by hatred as is now the case. If our new President can do anything to bring our world back into balance, it would be this: To allow the ancient teahouse tradition to return to its better days, when hatred of the West was not on everyone's lips but the promise of modernity was.

Then, this special land can and will start exporting, not violence, but the most succulent fruits and nuts ever known in Central Asia, not to mention kabobs, korma, nan, and so many more dishes, as first documented by Marco Polo, and later validated by me, among many others.

Peace in Afghanistan just might mean peace in all the world. Plus, all of us who love tasteful food could then feel a new wave of pleasure at the name of this ancient land. Imagine that! Breaking bread with one another, rather than blowing one another to smithereens.

Might it happen?

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What Was in Cheney's Boxes?

And why was he carrying them? Outgoing Vice-President Dick Cheney witnessed the Inauguration in a wheelchair, after injuring his back moving boxes himself from his office to his home. It is routine, of course, for professional movers to do this work, not the Vice-President, particularly one who is aged with heart trouble. Certainly for all the legitimate material, professionals did the job.

But Cheney, more than any other member of the Bush administration, was implicated in many scandals involving the withholding of information from public disclosure, and therefore, it is logical to conclude he's decided to be the sole custodian of some of his most controversial documents.

It follows that he wouldn't want anyone but himself to touch those boxes of secret papers, so that no paper trail be created via the tagging systems used by government movers.

Think back. He refused to reveal who influenced his secret energy-policy work in Bush's first term. Later, he was deeply involved in the torture decisions, such as water-boarding, following 9/11. (Strangely, during a round of "farewell" press appearances, Cheney admitted this role, which now seems likely to help trigger war crimes investigations, and probably charges against him, at least overseas, if not domestic courts.)

But there was so much more. The volatile Valerie Plame scandal, where Cheney threw his loyal aide Scooter Libby to the wolves, although hand-written notes on key documents bore powerful evidence of Cheney's involvement. Prosecutors couldn't get Libby or others to "turn," thus in the end Cheney escaped the consequences for his illegal actions once again.

The enormous illegal surveillance effort undertaken not against terrorist suspects but against millions of law-abiding Americans is only now beginning to come to light. Cheney helped architect this, as well as other programs to blatantly violate Americans' civil liberties, in ways we will still be discovering for years to come.

The Obama administration has promised a new transparency, part of which, in my view, must include not only what our government does in the future but what it was doing these past eight years. This represents a delicate challenge for Obama, who clearly does not relish disrespecting political opponents or predecessors in office.

But to ignore the errors of the past is to risk repeating them. A good start would be to investigate what was in the boxes that strained Cheney's back. My educated guess, rooted in human psychology, is that those particular boxes have an important story to tell.

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Historically Symbolic Leadership

The sight of President Obama in his Sox baseball cap, working his newly encrypted Blackberry, is likely to be as symbolic of his Presidency as was the photo op of President Eisenhower on the golf course half a century earlier.

In the '50s, with an aging war hero in the White House, and the economy growing rapidly with the fruits of victory in World War Two, Ike captured the middle class dream of reaching your golden years successfully so you could hit the links. Furthermore, the sight of him conducting the world's business while relaxing on a golf course set an image that remains so solidly at the essence of the fantasy of the successful businessmen that it retains great power to this day.

Now comes Barack Hussein Obama. His sport is inner-city hoops, and, when told that he would have to give up the networked communication habits that so dramatically carried him to electoral victory -- his answer was "No, we can't!" He rose to power via that ever-present Blackberry, laptops, Facebook, and an aggressive email list in combo with a dynamic wesbite, Change.gov, that helped whip up that astonishing pent-up excitement visible on the Mall on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, his staff yesterday encountered a White House mired in the technological "Dark Ages," with few laptops, no personal or external email links, unplugged, analog phones with ancient cords, and desktops "working" on six-year-old Microsoft software.

Out with the old. In with the new. The Obama team will have to go all the way to the root and rebuild a White House IT system suitable for the 21st Century. Fortunately, by all indications, they've easily got the chops to do so. They're already patching together gmail accounts, cellular aps, and other web-based workarounds while more fundamental technological changes can be installed.

One interesting development -- the Obama team reportedly prefers Macs to PCs, which might be one reason Apple's stock is trading up today, in defiance of another general market turndown.

The Guilt-Ridden Father as Job Seeker

Half-listening to an NPR show the other day, I heard a guest who works with people who have been laid off refer to losing a job as "one of the most traumatic" things that can happen to you.

If true, I'm probably suffering from PTSD by now, as my career has been so riddled with unexpected layoffs, transfers, company closures, and other untenable circumstances that forced me to move on. My father's generation grew up with an expectation that a job was pretty much for life, or that at least a series of jobs within a single company or a small number of companies was what his future would hold.

Many of us who came to age in the 1960s rebelled against that life model, opting instead to create or join alternative institutions, build them from the ground up, and eventually move on to the next challenge.

"Serial entrepreneurs," you might call us.

There's nothing wrong with this model; it's one way the society grows and becomes more productive. Small businesses generate many of the best new ideas and products that enter our economy, and it's always been that way.

But this lifestyle, which carries additional risks to those working within more traditional careers, becomes extremely difficult to balance with supporting a family. The hours a person burns worrying about their kids during periods like the present one are one of the worst types of stress I see around me, as well as within myself.

It almost feels as if you are "making yourself sick with worry" -- one thing my father always warned against. I wished I'd listened to him better, or somehow picked up his coping skills, which were much less self-destructive than those prevalent in my generation.

The skies have darkened today; the weeks of sunshine have passed. It's so very gloomy, inside and out.

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