Bowgate And Managerial Conundra

The image of President Obama bowing deeply while greeting Japan's Emperor Akihito has generated many spilt electrons of apoplectic outrage and instinctive, unthinking apologia.  But in fact, both the left and the right have it wrong.  And it's not the first time that this sort of imbroglio has happened, either.

The right has it wrong that Presidents do not bow before royalty.  (Query if this is a bow, although whether we call it a "bow" or not, the drop of the head carries a symbolic implication of subordination.)  The correct answer seems to be that some do and some do not.*  The right kind of bow for a President to give the Emperor -- or any royalty or other holdovers from the ancien régime against which America revolted at the beginning of her independence -- is a slight, subtle rocking forward from the waist, with a small nod of the head.  Nothing more than the sort of acknowledgment of recognition that one person might give to another across a crowded room, when it is inconvenient to cross the room and shake hands.

Obama, however, gave what seems to be known in Japan as the saikeirei bow, which is listed in some protocol guides as conveying "maximum respect" -- good in theory for protocol and diplomacy, but which in actual Japanese custom is used by a subordinate to greet a superior while delivering an apology for some kind of failure.  The proffer of a handshake during the bow is a further compounding of the subordination of the bower to the person to whom the bow is offered.  (Thanks to Doug Mataconis for the translation of the Japanese protocol manual.)

The fact of the matter is that there are elaborate and subtle protocols in Japanese culture about who bows to whom, when, for how long, and how deeply.  Gaijin like us can only hope to really understand the result of years of strong cultural pressures that impress upon upper-class Japanese society the norms and modes of how to behave in such situation.  As an intellectual exercise, then, Obama can be forgiven, in my mind, for getting it wrong.  But this is the sort of thing that people who study management of large organizations look at and are driven absolutely crazy.

See, somewhere in the Protocol Office of the State Department is someone who actually has the knowledge necessary to instruct the President about the optimal way to greet the Emperor.  Whether that's a strong-postured handshake between equals (something which has good emotional resonance for those of us with strong small-"r" republican sentiments) or a subtle Nixonian bow (the President is, after all, on the Emperor's turf)* is not all that important.  What's important is that there is someone with the right answer.

First, this person needs to have both the exposure to information and the initiative to have figured out that the President was going to travel to Japan and meet with the Emperor soon, thereby acting within this person's particular sphere of expertise.  How do you teach someone to pay attention to the news and realize that they have something of value to contribute?

Second, how do you teach them that not only would their contribution be useful, but that it is needed in the first place?  It's entirely possible that the protocol officer figured, "Hey, the President knows what he's doing, I don't need to get involved," or worse, "If I stick my head up here, I might get it cut off."  So you need to somehow teach someone the initiative to say, "Hey, maybe we ought to shoot a memo over and let the President's people give the big guy some tips on how to avoid a flap."

Third, assuming this person actually connects the dots and acts on the picture thus drawn, what happens to that memo, that e-mail, or whatever other communication results?  This protocol officer does not have direct access to the President, and for good reason.  If every protocol officer, every intelligence analyst, every budget officer, every Federal employee with expertise in any of the myriad fields of activity in which the President exercises general oversight, could communicate directly with the President, then the President would be too busy gathering information from all these people to act on it.  He must of necessity rely on subordinates to gather, process, filter, and prioritize information for him.  He must do so without directly knowing what information is being thus filtered.

In practice, there are a lot of filters between the protocol officer and the President.  The protocol officer's superior, the Secretary of State, the White House's protocol office, the President's secretary and Chief of Staff -- all these people exercise filtering functions and decide for the President what is and is not important enough to merit the President's attention.  If any of these people filter out important information, it gets lost.  So how do you separate the good stuff from the noise?

Fourth, assuming this information actually gets to the President, he needs to remember it and act on it.  The President has a lot on his mind and protocol can actually be quite a subtle thing -- and remember, we're dealing with something that non-Japanese find inherently confusing and complex here.  The President is doing more than just remembering how to bow when he's meeting the Emperor of Japan; there are a whole lot of diplomatic things going on at once.  And he's doing more on his trip than having tea -- there is actual roll-up-the-sleeves type of governmental work to be done with Japan's government, as well as the public ceremonies.  So the President himself might have simply not filed that bit of information away in the right way and blanked out when the time came to use it, and relied instead on his best guess.

Anyone can forget stuff like that when they get put on the spot.  I can recall a fellow Italian tourist telling me that he was embarrassed after meeting his friend's wife, because he had tried to use a form of Italian that was polite and formal, and his friend told him halfway through the dinner, "You don't have to treat her like she's the Pope."  In fact, there is a form of Italian that is very polite which is reserved for speaking with the Pope (basically, you use the third-person plural instead of the third-person singular conjugation of verbs).

Which is all to say, yeah, the President made a diplomatic mistake.  It's easy to see how that happened, though; this sort of information management, on-the-spot thinking, and cultural dissonance makes this sort of thing inevitable.  So now that the President's mistake has been pointed out and micro-analyzed down to its atomic particles, the real question is whether he possesses the administrative expertise to improve the process in the future.  This is the sort of thing about which I have always had reservations about Obama -- because his pre-Presidential background is entirely legislative and not executive or managerial in any way.

*  Does location matter?  If greeting the Emperor at the White House, is the protocol different than meeting the Emperor at the Imperial Palace?

One Source Of New Funding

I think maybe our federal and state governments haven't been looking hard enough for money. After all, there's actual gold to be hand if we're just willing to go get it. My big question is, how did it get there in the first place?

Hat tip to The Poor Mouth.

To Where Will Right Winger Deserters Flee?

"Oh, man, if Bush gets re-elected, I'm going to Canada."

"If McCain gets elected over Obama, man, the fix is in. I'm outta here, I'll go to the Netherlands."

I've heard more of that kind of crap from left-wing kool-aid drinkers over the years than I care to remember. I guess it hearkens back to the glory days of Vietnam War protesters dodging the draft by fleeing to Canada or Switzerland or somewhere like that. As if that were somehow glamorous or righteous.

But now, that worm has turned around completely. Barack Hussein Obama has been elected President. Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House of Representatives with a commanding majority. The Democrats have tossed out Ted Stevens from the Senate, for Chrissake, and are a hairs' breath away from a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. There is nothing -- nothing -- to stop the party that harbors and encourages the sort of policies that many on the right once dared call "treason" from having their way with us.

Of course, our children will all now be taught to be gay in second grade, ownership of a firearm will be an imprisonable offense, and we will all need to learn Spanish in order to vote. George Washington's birthday will no longer be a holiday and Cesar Chavez will replace him on the $1.00 bill. Or, rather, the $1.00 coin because the Democrats are going to take our money away.

So it's natural to think that right-wing kool-aid drinkers are going to feel an impulse to leave. For instance, check out comment #5 on this post about a blogbuddy returning to the United States after a sojourn abroad:

Italy will be better off without you.You’re just like all the folks who come here and expect US to accommodate all their needs,speak their language, adjust to their culture. Welcome home…enjoy your success and your new leader and maybe you’ll not get taxed out of existence. I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. Not my America any more. -- cas

Oh, really, cas? So where, exactly, do you intend on going? Where is this right-wing fantasyland where men can be men and own huge arsenals of big, deadly guns and the government will tolerate it? Maybe you're thinking Iraq? No problem owning lots of guns there. But somehow I doubt that an Arabic-speaking country dominated by Muslims and still susceptible to urban terrorism is going to be terribly appealing to cas and others like him who prefer the red kool-aid to the blue, even with the decidedly permissive de facto rules about owning weapons there.

Maybe to that mecca of free-market capitalism, Japan. If he can somehow persuade the government of that famously xenophobic nation into giving a gaijin like him a residency visa. He may have to promise to shower four times a day. And forget about owning any land, even if he could afford it. So, I guess that's out.

Now, you can have some weapons in Russia -- hey, сказать привет моему другу мало! And, for the time being, the Russians are overtly capitalists. But you've pretty much got to have tons of dough if you want to live anywhere decent, like Moscow or Petersburg. And Putin is pretty much turning into the Enemy again, so cas probably isn't thinking real seriously about Russia.

Now, I'm going to hazard a guess here and suggest that cas and his fellow right-wingers are probably not super-fluent in non-English languages and can't be bothered to learn them. It's very likely that cas is an English-is-the-official-language sort of guy. That might be a stretch. But I don't feel like it's a big one. So that limits the choices to only a few options, countries where English is the primary language. Maybe he can go to India or Pakistan and teach English to successive generations of tech support specialists and learn to love ghat and curry.

Canada, of course, is not an option; they're a bunch of peacenik socialists and gun-grabbers, and they have the most open immigration policy of any nation on Earth so the whole place is a gigantic security risk. Of the remaining English-speaking countries, you need to be ultra-loaded to emigrate to the UK, and you can't have a gun there. Or in Ireland. Or in the urban parts of Australia or anywhere in New Zealand. Or (now) Hong Kong -- the PRC is in charge there now, not Her Majesty's Government, and they don't like people they don't know having weapons.

South Africa? English is a secondary language there -- so maybe cas could use his English to get started while he brushes up on his Afrikaans and Swahili. Of course, you've got racial tensions, a seriously declining economy, and restrictions on firearms again, but that's not so different from here, really. And the climate is a lot like Southern California, just upside-down.

Maybe cas is Jewish and can exercise Aliyah. Then, he could go to Israel. There is gun control, but he could have a military-grade weapon in his kibbutz as long as he was part of the IDF Reserves, which I bet cas would think was cool. English isn't the primary language there, but it would be enough to get him started, and if cas is Jewish he may know some Hebrew. Yeah, they're pretty much socialists there but there is private enterprise. So, if you're in the Tribe, cas, massel tov. But if you're not Jewish, I think you're pretty much looking at Jo-burg.

Japan's Aircraft Carrier

The balance of power in today's multipolar world just got a little bit more complicated.



The aircraft in question may be helicopters but could, in theory, be Harriers or similar kinds of VTOL aircraft. At the end of this article, the author points out that these ships are as large as British carriers were in the early 1980's, when the British fought and won a war halfway around the globe from their home ports.