Pippa on her first day with me

With a traveling lifestyle as I have, it has never been possible to have a dog. It’s not practical, a dog would confine me to a city and limit my freedom, who would take care of it when I’m not hop-scot-shing from one city to the next? There have been many excuses not to take the one pet I’ve always wanted, a Jack Russell. » Read more «

At his recent appearance at the New York Public Library, Pico Iyer spoke to Paul Holdengraber about his latest book, “The Open Road, The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” which has been widely covered in the press (The Economist, New York Times, New Yorker). All these fine publications have told the reader about the book and its context in the Tibetan conflict with China.

This particular evening, Holdengraber wondered about the craft of writing the book, and whether Iyer was able to take his own preconceptions out when reflecting on the Dalai Lama. Iyer admitted having worked hard on the craft and that it proved impossible to get himself out of the story. He explained that the book is not a straight biography of the Dalai Lama but more a biography of ideas and ideals, or rather “the possibility of an idea.” He often refers to Henry Thoreau and his instrumental role in showing the universality of Buddhist ideas to the American public.

The book is more an inner dialogue than a Q&A with the Dalai Lama. Iyer has taken the angle of a student of literature who sees the “challenges to his vision.” He built the structure of the book as a Buddhist religious studies ritual debate: research, analyze, explore, making each chapter a rebuttal to the Dalai Lama, challenging his ideals.

Iyer uses his personal story, going back to the days before television when he was a two-year-old boy. He remembers listening to the radio and hearing about the flight of the Dalai Lama, escaping Tibet across the Himalayas on foot. Arriving in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama is said to have exclaimed to his brother, “We’re free!” Iyer noted the irony of calling exile “freedom,” and explained that in Tibet the Dalai Lama had been limited in movement by his status, and in exile he has been able to put Tibet on the global map, allowing that remote part of the world to become more connected to the global community. Old Tibet was too isolated and with the Dalai Lama in exile he has been able to learn about scientific discoveries, made education more accessible to women and find the balance between tradition and transition, referring to one of the Hassidic proverbs Iyer used in “The Open Road.”

Iyer elaborated on his thoughts that globalization constitutes pieces of different cultures, enlarging the community you’re from, interconnecting everything. Seeing life as a fluid river versus a fixed structure. In that sense the Dalai Lama’s exile has given him freedom he could never have enjoyed had he stayed in the strict confines of his position in Tibet. He embraced the change, and sees it as an opening of possibilities, and allowing him to draw from many different directions, leaving the old designs behind him. The lack of structure and homelessness has also allowed the Dalai Lama to construct a home without property, to carry the sense of belonging inside him, wherever he may be. The teachings to his people also carry this message, to construct a home without physical property. It doesn’t matter if Tibet doesn’t exist anymore as long as the Tibetans have a Tibetan consciousness. This also applies to the Palestinians, that there is no loss of identity even if the physical home has been lost. Seeing this as an opportunity to become part of the larger global community. He sees change as a constant, allowing for a fluidity that makes everything possible. Like a Mandala.

In this era of exiles, according to Iyer about 33 million, we don’t have to define ourselves by differences. The Dalai Lama’s message is unifying.

In today’s world we’re all connected, globalization being the new reality, when everyone becomes a neighbor. This proximity makes that we have to be extra careful how we interact with our neighbors because our destinies are intertwined; there is interdependence and the consequences of our actions. People are drawing from many different directions, and we don’t have to define ourselves by differences anymore. Iyer explains that the Dalai Lama also uses this analysis for the precarious relationship between Tibet and China. They will always be neighbors, and the Dalai Lama takes the long-term view.

Iyer says he wrote the book to build a bridge in today’s bi-polar world. He would like to contribute to stopping the horrors that are being carried out in the name of religion. He wants to show how the Dalai Lama sees the world from different angles on humanity and reality, shedding new light on old conflicts.

Iyer, an avid journeyer, believes that travel transforms people, and through his writing he is contributing to more understanding and ultimately a more peaceful world. Although he repeatedly mentions he is not a Buddhist, he espouses the Buddhist philosophy of a never-ending open road.

Iyer continues that the Dalai Lama is not interested in his celebrity. He would like people to focus more on the teaching not on the teacher. Iyer at one point also mentioned that Jesus would be loved more if he were less adored. He continued that the Dalai Lama teaches that discontent is a product of our inner-weather, that we need to look at our moods. We need to explore our inner/outer weather, and that the mind can make heaven of hell and vice versa. Things change in unforeseeable ways, and to navigate the storm, one should not compromise values. The Dalai Lama works against self-interest . The principles don’t shift, while the application may.

The conversation continued with a discussion of the proverbs Iyer sprinkled throughout the book. He chose them from many different schools of thought and the one that stuck most with me was Henry James who, on his deathbed, said, “be kind, be kind, be kind.” Which is also the peaceful message of the Dalai Lama, in this interconnected world: Understand the common humanity and treat the other as part of yourself.

I still remember clearly the day in 2002 when I almost met Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The choir I sang with was performing at a memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, one year after the attacks of September 11, and Tutu delivered the homily. Like many people, I felt awe-struck in his presence. It would be hard not to feel so: This was the man who had somehow been able to lead—with grace and humility—victims and perpetrators of Apartheid-era South Africa through a process that required them to come face-to-face and recognize the harm they had done to one another. Against the grain of recent history, he had been able to guide these Truth and Reconciliation hearings with a transcendent discourse that expected more of the people involved than the same old recrimination and dehumanization of the other side. After the service, I considered approaching him to stammer out some incoherent but heartfelt line about how the world was a better place for his presence in it, but instead, I ended up hovering seven feet away in hesitation, as he and some clergy stood talking, their backs towards me.

What hit me in that moment was Tutu’s slight stature; though he may have been adorned with the scarlet cloak and cap befitting someone of his position in the Anglican Church, the man these garments adorned was actually quite small and, well, human-sized. Yet, still, he exuded an aura of beneficence, of wisdom, of gentleness—as a person who simply commands respect, not through coercion or manipulation or domination, but through the sheer force of his humanity. He was at once undeniably human—of flesh and blood, and no doubt flawed like the rest of us—and, at the same time, in command of a moral force to which few of us have access.

Five years later, he and eleven others who, through their tireless work for peace and justice, similarly defy the limits of humanity—or perhaps remind us of what humanity really is, or can be—came together as the Elders, a group whose aim is to “catalyze peaceful resolutions to long-standing conflicts, articulate new approaches to global issues that are or may cause immense human suffering, and share wisdom by helping to connect voices all over the world.” Entrepreneur Richard Branson and musician/activist Peter Gabriel came up with the idea for the Elders in conversation with former South African President Nelson Mandela about how to confront seemingly insurmountable conflicts and global issues (such as malaria and climate change). Branson and Gabriel felt that as the world approached global village status it was still missing its village elders—political leaders, activists, and humanitarians who could use the respect accorded their age, experience, and wisdom to intervene in crises and prevent conflicts from escalating to violence. As Branson put it in a recent interview with Oprah, Gabriel and he “felt that the world needed a group of wise leaders to look up to—men and women who are beyond ego, who can look past their borders and take on global issues.”

Mandela was receptive to the idea, and he and fellow founding members announced the initiation of the group in Johannesburg on his 89th birthday this past July. Along with Mandela and Tutu (who is the Chair), current Elders include: Graça Machel (women’s and children’s rights advocate and President of the Foundation for Community Development), Kofi Annan (former United Nations Secretary General), Jimmy Carter (former President of the United States), Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland, and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights), Muhammad Yunus (founder of Grameen Bank), Ela Bhatt (grassroots development and microfinance advocate in India), Gro Harlem Brundtland (physician, and former director general of the World Health Organization), Fernando H. Cardoso (sociologist, and former President of Brazil), Lakhdar Brahimi (former special representative of and former special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General), and Ann San Suu Kyi (leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma).

Because they act in their capacities as private citizens (albeit private citizens who are very public figures), the Elders are not beholden to any government. And, since they are funded privately—by a few individuals and foundations, including the Bridgeway Foundation, Humanity United, and The United Nations Foundation—they are not accountable to special interests. This means that they can operate with a combination of independence, flexibility, and impartiality that is rare in global politics.
So far, the Elders have focused their energies on three conflicts: Darfur/Sudan, Kenya, and the Middle East. Their first full-fledged mission was to Sudan last fall. Elders Tutu, Brahimi, Carter, and Machel spent four days in Sudan traveling between the northern capital city of Khartoum, Juba in the South, and El-Fasher and Nyala in Darfur, speaking with and listening to government officials (including President al-Bashir), community leaders and activists, and internally displaced people in the Darfur camps. Though it remains to be seen whether the Elders’ report from this trip will have any impact, it is a clear outline of the steps each side needs to take to protect civilian populations and the key issues each side needs to address to move towards a genuine, sustainable peace.
The Elders also intervened in Kenya’s recent post-electoral crisis. Tutu arrived shortly after the violence began, “pressing for calm and peaceful mediation,” and Elders Annan and Machel, along with Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa, headed up the mediation team that, at the invitation of the African Union, finally brokered a power-sharing agreement between President Kibaki and opposition candidate Raila Odinga.

Most recently, Elder Carter embarked on a much more controversial mission, meeting with leaders in Israel/Palestine (including those of Hamas) to help break the deadlock between Israel and the occupied territories that is increasingly exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Both Israel and the United States identify Hamas as a terrorist organization, refusing to speak directly with its leaders, so Carter’s step was bold. In the face of this powerful opposition, however, he proceeded and emerged from meetings with what seemed like a real coup: Hamas, whose official stance on Israel until now has been to refuse its right to exist, declared that it would accept Israel’s existence within 1967 borders as the peaceful neighbor of a Palestinian state—if that is what Palestinians voted for. Even though Carter made sure to have this in writing, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has since toned down his statement, saying that such an arrangement would represent not a recognition of Israel’s right to exist but rather a semi-long-term “truce” with the state of Israel. There is disagreement, therefore, on whether Carter made any headway on his visit. Yet, such small steps can create political space for deeper recognition in the future.

The Elders’ track record, though mixed, is impressive—especially given that the organization is not even a year old. But the organization is not without its detractors. A quick internet search reveals a range of criticism—from conservatives and pro-lifers who see the Elders as a group of left-wingers with a nefarious agenda to those who say such “idealistic” attempts at peace and justice will make little difference in the hard, cold “reality” of international power politics. The former critiques—which say that the group supports anti-Israeli terrorists and advocates for homosexuality and abortions—are unfounded, as they actively misrepresent the rights for which many of the Elders have worked. (Though the group has leveled difficult criticisms against Israel, they have certainly never supported suicide bombings.) What this argument proves, though, is the difficulty of finding a dozen non-controversial figures who are universally respected.

But the latter so-called “realist” critiques are more serious—the claim that the effectiveness of the Elders’ work is severely hampered because they don’t have the military or economic power of a state (or even an international organization like the United Nations) to back them up. What this criticism misses, however, is that state-backed diplomacy and even military action are often not terribly effective. And that is precisely how the Elders might be useful.

It is precisely because traditional diplomats represent states, that they often do not have the freedom to, for instance, engage with the most despicable leaders or groups, as this would constitute a loss of face—a sign that the state is “giving in” to terrorists. And even if a diplomat or state leader agrees to enter into talks with a disreputable leader or group, his or her inducements can often be more easily disregarded than those communicated by respected persons with no political attachments.

As Branson put it to Oprah, “When someone like Nelson Mandela or Kofi Annan is on the phone, people will take that call.” When an Elder agrees to meet, listen to, and speak with political leaders who may be responsible for horrible acts, they exercise a different form of power than that of military or economic might. This power goes beyond the discreet persuasion or even coercion of traditional state diplomacy; it is the power that comes from the moral force of being a respected human being. It is harder to claim that someone like Desmond Tutu has hidden imperialistic motives, or that Jimmy Carter (who is risking his reputation in actively opposing the official policy of his home country) is not to be trusted. Crossing someone who has the respect of the global community—and who is clearly not working for his or her own state’s self-interest—has real consequences in terms of how a state or a group can portray itself to its allies.

The conflicts in both Sudan and Israel/Palestine, racked with complexities, will be difficult to resolve, or even temporarily defuse—even with the intervention of some of the most widely respected people on the globe. But neither will these conflicts be transformed by more of the same—cycles of violence or armed interventions that assume military force can make layers of acquired hostility, subordination, dehumanization, and grievances simply disintegrate. If anything will be effective in achieving a just peace in these conflicts, it will be the slow, steady work that includes the watchful eyes of the global community, and the mindful presence and moral pressure of those who are prominent enough to demand attention and courageous enough to sit down with leaders whose actions they deplore.

All twelve Elders know that peace and justice don’t come overnight—that real change is messy, imperfect, and risky. They cannot be accused of sitting in ivory towers and proclaiming their utopian visions; they know the reality of violence and the reality of injustice. And to confront it, they offer their humanity, their openness to listen to their fellow human beings. Tutu suggested, in his homily at the Washington National Cathedral on September 11, 2002, that as Americans “come to know a little of the insecurity, the sense of helplessness, that so many of their sisters and brothers out there have experienced as their daily lot,” they should respond by recognizing that their fate is tied to that of the rest of the world. By seeing the rest of the world as their responsibility and by engaging with everyone—even those who are responsible for wrong-doing—the Elders embody this ethic of shared security, and of shared vulnerability.

This shared vulnerability is what makes us part of the human family, and it is the radical notion that we “belong together,” in Tutu’s words, which reverberate from an old cassette tape I’ve saved from that day—this “radical-ness that we have not yet fathomed, that we are members of one family,” Hutu and Tutsi, Bush and bin Laden, Palestinians and Israelis—that ultimately guides the work that the Elders must take on.

Molly Wallace is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Brown University and is a volunteer mediator at the Community Mediation Center of Rhode Island. She is writing her dissertation on nonviolent action.

If you’ve never heard of Keith Reinhard, you know him by the ad slogans he created. Does “You Deserve A Break Today,” or “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun” ring a bell? The man who made these iconic contributions to American advertising has now turned his energy towards a not-for-profit effort to regain America’s image around the world, an image he says has been declining since the end of the Cold War, but that has been decidedly trashed over the last eight years. Reinhard is the co-founder and president of Business for Diplomatic Action, which aims to privatize public diplomacy by building bridges between America and the nations of the world, with a special emphasis on improving Arab-American business relationships. The Chairman Emeritus of the ad agency DDB Worldwide, Reinhard is a self-described global citizen who will not rest until he has re-branded America.

EG: How did your background in advertising lead to your taking on the mission of restoring America’s image around the world?
KR: As a working CEO and chairman of a network of ad agencies, 200 offices/200 countries, or so, I had to be very interested in how people from different backgrounds and cultures could work together. Culture is so important in a far-flung network. So there were 15,000 people but they were aggregated in offices in average sizes of 40 or 60 maybe. So we had all these cultures from different countries trying to form one common cultural family. I became kind of a global citizen as part of my job.

We were very conscious in building our global organization that Americans don’t have an exclusive on creativity or ideas or imagination or ideas; they can come from everywhere. We intentionally located our international headquarters of our international operations outside the United States in Paris. So my right hand was a Frenchman, and my left hand was an Australian.

I learned early that if you celebrate differences—forget tolerance, even forget acceptance—and go all the way to affirmation and celebration of differences, how interesting that makes us to each other. And if you can take all of these diverse cultures and unite them around one set of values, beliefs and goals, it’s tremendously exciting.
EG: It sounds like you were destined to work in diplomacy. That was a very forward-thinking way to work, pre-September 11, 2001. How did the events of that day shape the way you proceeded to approach your work?
KR: When I was still Chairman [of DDB Worldwide], in October 2001, the President had a press conference and asked, ‘why would anyone not like us? We’re so good!’

And I thought, whoa! There are a lot of reasons people resent us. This might be a good time to take the temperature with a qualitative project in what turned out to be 17 countries. I called our research director and asked him to take a microphone and notebook, and ask people, “What do you love about America and what don’t you?”

EG: What did your study discover?
KR: A lot of the responses were, we love the Americans’ optimism, even when it’s approaching naiveté; and the can-do spirit; and youthful enthusiasm; technology; education system; and ethnic diversity was very much a positive. Some people mentioned wealth, and benevolence.

The negatives, however, were consistent across all regions, and they were quite strident, I thought, for so soon after 9/11. In descending, offending order: the first negative perception was that we exploit. A man from Chile said, “America is like a disease. It infects the body but it doesn’t care about the body. It just takes, and then moves on to another body.”

The second negative perception was that we corrupt with our entertainment product and even with our marketing, and we promote values that are not in concert with local mores, or even religions in some cases.

The third negative perception was “the ugly American.” And then there was the usual litany: loud, monolingual, rude, crude.

And the fourth negative perception was materiality. That we just like ‘stuff.’

The most used word was arrogance, and I asked one person how we manifest our arrogance, and he said, “You honestly believe that inside every human on the planet is an American trying to get out. And that’s true; we like and admire much of American culture and society and lifestyle, but we have a culture that we like and admire too, and you might want to learn something about that.”

The second most frequently-used word was ignorance. A woman in Germany said, “How can you pretend to lead the world when you don’t know anything about the world?”

What we tried actively to make sure of, was that we were first of all listeners; that we would go into a market and listen carefully to what potential partners had in mind, what their aspirations and hopes were, how they saw the world.

EG: How did the start of the Iraq war affect your company strategies?
KR: If I had done the research after the Iraq war began, I probably wouldn’t have formed the organization, because the root cause of anti-American sentiment after Iraq was foreign policy, and there’s nothing business can do directly to affect foreign policy. But think about the strengths of business, its vast reach and resources, its efficiency compared to the government, and its sustainability—because you don’t have to change policy every four years, it’s relative lack of bureaucratic entanglement, and we really are well-placed [for diplomatic action].
EG: Your mission is to restore America’s standing as “courier of progress and prosperity for all people.” Was there a time before Communism when you feel that was really our image in the world, or did the Cold War provide the world with a false sense of America being ‘right’ and communism being ‘wrong,’? That is, were we favored merely because we were the ‘lesser evil’? Is there a time in history when you believe the U.S. embodied the image that your mission wants to restore?
KR: The Marshal Plan was such a good example of such a time in history. Within the last year I made my first visit to Hiroshima. I was taken on a tour by a young Japanese woman—many of her relatives had been killed by the blast. And yet she was so grateful, so thankful for what the Americans did to bring industry and to raise the Japanese standard of life, and for what the Americans did to free them from what had been much more repressive than I’d ever understood.

So my thinking was along this line. That, “having conquered, now we will restore, now we will help rebuild.” So that’s the spirit that we should aspire to again.
EG: So America needs to redefine itself. You talk about this in terms of re-branding America. Would you explain what you mean by that?
KR: In branding, we try to reduce a strong enduring brand to the right combination of 3 P’s:
A strongly-held Point-of-view, out of which flows a Promise—implied or explicit, all clothed in an attractive Personality.

The American brand had evolved to the place where our point of view was “our way is the best way, maybe the only way.” Our implied promise was “we will impose it on you whether you want it or not.” And our personality was “crude, cowboy, bully.”

What we have to do is get back to a point of view that is more like the one our Founders had in mind, that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If we could apply that to a point of view for the planet, that’d be cool!

And we can also make sure that when we say “pursuit of happiness,” (and ‘pursuit’ I think is the active ingredient in brand America) that is, happiness as you define it, not as we define it. If you’d like us to help you, we will try to help you. A young professor from Tehran said, “We want you first to listen to what we care about and then maybe that will give you ideas about how you can lead the world and what the world cares about.” I thought that was pretty good, what the world cares about.

I don’t know how to describe the personality that should be the new Brand America; but it should not be an old white guy pointing his finger at you.

In the April 2008 issue of Fast Company I’ve been quoted on the subject of Barack Obama as a brand, and I said, “He’s new, different and attractive.” Those would be pretty good qualities for a brand.

EG: How much of this perceived negative image of America might be just a self-loathing, in the sense that we’ve all been stuck for 8 years being identified with this government that makes us feel so bad? How do you gauge what are perceptions against what may be a different reality?
KR: In terms of negative perceptions, you would say those negative perceptions that are true, you have to change the product. Those negative perceptions that are not true, you have to change the communications about the product.

[My wife] Rose-Lee and I had dinner with a couple from India recently. He had just been at a conference in Washington where he said a U.S. congressman was standing up apologizing for 30 minutes about the behavior of the United States. And he found that so unbecoming.

And in brand land, we would say, No, you have to retain pride in the core values and say, like Bill Clinton said in his 2nd inaugural, “There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what’s right with America.” And that’s the way to frame it, I think. You have to find the right balance in this point in time to say, okay, we have made mistakes, but we’re going to correct those mistakes and we’re going to re-emerge.

EG: How hopeful are you that this can happen?
KR: You have to have hope. The damage that’s been done in the last seven years isn’t all Bush. This resentment has been building for these four reasons for two decades. What happened with Iraq is that these latent feelings were ignited, and then exacerbated with one thing after another: Abu Ghraib, Kyoto, Katrina… all of those things. And, as we know, there’s a tipping point. It takes a long time to build a strong, enduring brand, but reputations can be destroyed overnight. So I think it is a generation or two away.

That’s why I’m so interested in young people and getting into the colleges and universities. And we have a new idea now, which is called the United States of Mind. It will mobilize young people around the world around projects and interests that will aid human development. One way we’re describing it is a digital peace corps using the two or three hundred social networks that exist already, but connecting them. It’s very nascent, but that’s the great hope, the young people around the world.

But back to am I hopeful? Yes. There’s a new survey out about the Middle East, and things are looking worse than ever in terms of their understanding of the United States. But a BBC poll showed a slight uptick on the measure of America’s positive influence on the world. It went from 31 to 35 percent. And one person analyzing it said, “It’s possible the fever has broken.”

Now, if that is true, I would say one reason is that people are taking note of the fact that we have a potential black president, a potential woman president. And, from my travels in Europe and the Middle East, they have no feeling for McCain, he’s simply more of the same. But they are excited about the other two.

For example in Germany [on a recent] Der Spiegel cover, there was a picture of Barack. Headline: The Messiah Factor. Sub-head: Could America Become Loved Again?

So, am I hopeful? Yeah, we could see a change in Washington. All three candidates have good statements in their stump speeches about realigning ourselves with the world, and all three have acknowledged that we are resented, in some cases hated, and seen negatively by most of the world. And they’ve all said this in different ways.

EG: What is right with America that can fix what is wrong?
KR: The idea of American naiveté is something very dear to me. What I mean by that is, if you don’t know something can’t be done, you just might do it!

When I created Omnicom in 1986 I could only find one paragraph in one journal that said it had any hope. Had I known all the problems, I never would have done it. Because I would have known that it was impossible.

And another way of saying it, is if your mind is not cluttered with too much knowledge, there is a clarity of vision that can develop. So I’m naïve enough to believe that we can elect a leader who can give us a vision.

So yes, I’m hopeful. And I’m also hopeful because the current administration has at least taken note.

EG: How in particular has the Bush Administration taken note?
KR: Among other things, they have at least talked about the need for more cultural diplomacy. We cut back on cultural diplomacy after the Cold War, and that’s another thing that gives rise to anti-American sentiment. We cut back on Voice of America, United States Information Agency was dismantled under Madeline Albright in 1998, and put back into the State Deptartment, and at one point we cut back 60% on cultural diplomacy.

The current administration has said, O.K., these things are important. They weren’t able to get funding for some of the good ideas they had, but Karen Hughes, then State Department undersecretary of public diplomacy and public affairs, said, “We have to wage peace.” So my colleagues and I from BDA went to Washington and said, “If you’re going to wage peace you have to fund it.” At one point her budget was less than that of the U.S. Army band.

EG: You said earlier your company would share ideas with the government. How have you done that?
KR: I was appointed to a twenty person advisory committee for Homeland Security and the State Department. Our report is now final. We have some recommendations that are very specific on visa reform and our behavior at our ports of entry. Some of them are being implemented even in the late innings of this administration.

The most radical recommendation we made, which made it into the final report, is to remove the public diplomacy function from the State Department and privatize it. We believe that such an entity—calling it perhaps the U.S. Center for Global Engagement—should be located in New York, outside the divisive political climate inside the beltway, and within the world’s communications capital. Currently, the State Department is charged with formulating and advocating U.S. foreign policy and public diplomacy. We say they should concentrate on the former, and let non-political interests take charge of the latter. “Public Diplomacy” refers to international relations that go beyond official interactions between national governments, covering interactions between Americans and residents of other countries, for example, tourism, cultural exchange, and academic and business exchange.

We’re the only developed country without a Tourist Ministry. And the second largest employer in the United States, which is tourism and hospitality, is losing billions of dollars because people aren’t coming here like they should be, especially given the current economy.

Australia spends $125 million a year and when we interviewed people in 23 countries as to where they’d go for vacation if money and distance were no object, Australia is number one. Advertising works! Surprise, surprise. We were number six.

So now we’re working with the Travel and Tourism industry and we have two bills in congress towards travel promotion.

EG: What is the state of American Tourism?
KR: With the dollar the way it is, we’re Filene’s Basement. We should have everybody here. But we’re still below 2000 levels. The travel industry contributes 12.3 billion dollars to our economy and 250,000 jobs. But the more important point for me is that—research is conclusive—when people actually come here, they like us. Once they get by our bullies at our border.

Americans make 60 million trips a year outside the U.S. That’s a chance for 60 million positive impressions, multiplied by the number of people each one of these Americans meets. Or, it’s an opportunity for 60 million bad impressions, multiplied by the number of people met by each traveler. How can we turn this group into citizen diplomats? So that’s what we’re trying to do with our World Citizenship program.

EG: What’s that?
KR: It’s an exchange program with young people in the Middle East. We teamed up with Zogby International in 2006 to do a survey of young Arab leaders in the United Arab Emirates. (But the participants were from various countries in the region.)

We asked them about their career aspirations, their life goals and so forth, in one-on-one interviews. Twenty-five percent of the sample were women. When it came to career aspirations, nearly half saw themselves in a business career 10 years hence. So we said, “What are the barriers in your path?” The answers were lack of skills, tools, and training. So we said, “Where would you like to get these tools?” They said, “American companies. In the United States.”

So that gave us the inspiration to form an organization with young people in the Middle East. We were able to bring seven young Arab leaders to the U.S. in our first wave last September.
We had them for a week in New York, a week in Des Moines, Iowa, and then in Washington D.C.

One of the companies was RR Donnelly and another was the Sesame Workshop. And both companies signed up to host two more young Arabs this year. And it was so wonderful! One of these young Arab executives, Shareen from Bahrain, went to RR Donnelly, and three days later the CEO said, “First of all, I want to hire her. But secondly, she has completely shattered all the stereotypes that our people had about women working in the Middle East.”

Only one of these seven had been to the United States before, and now they’re networking and they’re like missionaries and ambassadors for us there. We’re going to bring twenty young Arabs to the United States this year and then I hope by next year we can really scale it up. We’re calling it the Fulbright of the business sector. Also, this year we’re sending ten young American executives to three Arab countries.

EG: I think you’d agree that you can still be a global citizen, or a global nomad if you will, even if you don’t travel often. In what ways do you think ordinary citizens, while at home, could play a more active role in all of this?
KR: First of all, we have to recognize that we’re all global citizens. My idea has been that every September 11th should be a national holiday called Interdependence Day, where all the schools would teach the kids that we are part of a global community. We can be proud to be Americans, but we have to have dual citizenship; we are also citizens of the planet.

I advise people to log onto WatchingAmerica.com where you can see newspapers translated into English. If you’re a grandparent or a parent, buy the kids a globe, get them tuned into the National Geographic for Kids. Take action in your local schools to get geography and social studies and world history back into the curriculum. And then, when you have a chance, if you’re associated with an organization that has a global outreach like a school or a university, what can you do to help welcome international visitors, and can you do something through your Rotary Clubs and Young Presidents organizations. There are lots of things that can be done by individual citizens.

But the biggest problem I have now is that, until you affect the media, you really don’t have impact. After hearing my pitch for Business for Diplomatic Action, an ex-CEO of a very well known Fortune 500 company said to me, “You remind me of an ant crawling up the rear leg of an elephant with rape on its mind.”

At the moment it’s hard to measure impact; we know we’re having some. Business for Diplomatic Action gave seventy-five speeches around the world last year. And we know that people are now getting tuned into this issue of America’s tarnished image. We did a sampling of 1,000 U.S. voters in September and 76% of them said we have to do something about our public diplomacy, our foreign policy, and our education. That number would have been 12% four years ago.

All these things together will eventually converge to a new awareness, a new approach and a new identity. I may not live to see it… But the alternative is to do nothing.

Photo: Keith Reinhard with head of Young Arab Leaders, Saeed Al Muntafiq, in Dubai.

Elizabeth Garnsey is a freelance writer and an Episcopal priest. She lives in New York City.

Who needs the craft most? Artist or patron? Scottish painter Lex Braes would argue that it is the painter, and that the act of painting itself is a way of finding meaning—in the diffidence of life, and in the rage that exists in all of us.

“Painting isn’t hard for me, it’s natural,” he says, in a gorgeous west coast Scottish brogue, tempered by years spent in Los Angeles, Zurich, and New York. I ask him more specifically about his process. “I see something; I draw something when I see it. Then there is a germination period from a few months to a few years. Then the image starts to make sense to me.”

The first time I visited with Braes in Brooklyn, New York, a few years back, he was, along with far too many artists, being evicted from his loft in DUMBO. He noted the imperative it had created in his painting. “Now that I’m just about to leave this neighborhood I’ve been noticing the suspension girders for the Manhattan Bridge. I’ve been here for years, and now there’s an urgency, and along with this urgency is a freedom.”

Freedom is a major theme in our conversations. The freedom to paint what feels natural versus what will sell. The freedom from the constraints of school-taught painting. The freedom from “camps” of artists, and the idea that there is “good” and “bad” art. For Braes, freedom means the difference between work that is merely willed work and work that is inspired—and the freedom from being easily categorized. I mention that he seems to have a sense of privilege about painting, about his right to be a success on his own terms, and that this contrasts with the more practical pull to commercial gain. “But I’m not comfortable with [the commercialism of art],” he responds, deepening the chasm between these two seeming opposites. “All I care about is the genuine article, the real stuff,” he says.

He grew up with a father who was a tradesman, painting houses, hanging wallpaper, painting tromp d’oeil images on grain doors. He hails from a grandfather who survived two wars and seven sunken ships. “He was a Highlander,” adds Braes, “of course, he couldn’t swim.”

The Braes family grew up in the Castlemilk housing estate in a working class area of Glasgow called Glenwood. He attended the experimental Glenwood Secondary School, a new type of school that practiced comprehensive education, and which provided working class students with a highly academic education. His school, in fact, was the first school in Britain to have a modern studies program. Phrases like “Dresden Bombing” and “American Negro” entered the lexicon of the school programs.

Little did Braes know then, but he was studying the same subjects that first-year college students were studying. He found this out years later when he met up with the head of the school system, long since retired. Braes also discovered that all of the heads of the school were members of the Scottish Communist Party, which explained the automated liberal sensibility amongst the teachers, but also the lack of diverse thought. Braes “got punished a lot for being different, for being interested, I guess, in myself. I think I developed a very strong repulsion for formal education—I had a very uncomfortable relationship with the system”— adding, with a wink— “to my great detriment.” His success as a painter—he has had a loyal following of private art collectors and gallerists—would indicate the opposite.

Today Braes teaches drawing to architecture students at the renowned Pratt Institute in New York. When I ask him what class he is teaching, he laughs and says he doesn’t know what it’s called—“I refuse to the learn the name.” He makes one up for me: “Analog Representation.”

As for his style of teaching, it is through action. “I believe the major themes or concepts come out of working, out of the practice of art,” he explains. “I can teach craft, process. But it is more about leading so that they can see for themselves…I’m teaching them rudimentary perspective that they should have learned at age 11, but got passed by.”

If there is a theme threading through Braes’ work, perhaps this is it, this sensation of not being passed by, of taking ideas and curling them into the paint brush as they occur, not being swept away by the ideologies of the moment, the flash in the pan trends, but stepping back and allowing ideas their full range of expression, without expectation. “It’s about deciding what’s important,” he says, “allowing yourself to be open, which wasn’t always easy for me.” Well, you are Scottish, I mention. “Yeah, all that fucking Calvinist shit,” he retorts.

Throughout our meetings, Braes speaks fluently about the tension between the artistic and commercial aspects of painting, and admits that he has steadily spurned the role of typecast contemporary artist, full of commercial savvy. This is most evident in his deliberated decision after September 11th to break away from his dealer in New York and what he calls “the art marketing machine.” He is a man who wants to paint—if he lived in the age of the Medicis, I believe he would pour pigment all day and surface only to accept a commission, and even that, somewhat reluctantly.

But that is an exaggeration, of course. He would also stop for tea and cakes, and for the vital embroilments of life, love, and sex. Food and love are passions about which Lex seems to draw little division from his work. In this respect, he is like an octopus, tentacles perusing anything within grasp and taking passionate hold of those objects (people, marmalades, cats, beers) which are both immediate, and immediately arresting to his senses. He is a man of great passion, and the broad strokes of his brush, plush strokes of thick red lines bear witness to a markedly rich interior life in each painting.

But I speak mostly of his earlier work, two, three, four years back. There is a new stroke in the brush today. Less abstract, his painting has taken on a sense of yearning—to comprehend faces, emotions, masks, and to paint an image that tells a specific story. As he explained to me in a recent email, intellectual rigor is essential to his work; he is inspired by everyday life, to be sure, but also by writing, by the Frankfurt School, and by the Deconstructionist movement in Paris—Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and the like. With each painting, Braes takes his initial subject matter—that image or thought that first grabbed his attention— and ardently deconstructs the myths that surround the image, as well as the myths that envelop the act of painting itself. Thus he makes intellectual decisions about the work while allowing for a deeply personal improvisation to actually reinvent the canvas. And the magic of his work is that despite the deconstruction, despite the slow accretion of image over idea, in the finished product the story is still wholly up for grabs.

“If you limit the idea to a product, rather than a gem, you lose the point,” he explains. “I try and allow the attraction of the image to generate an open possibility of an idea, not a closed one.” A prime example of this is his series of paintings with men and women looking upwards, to the sky, to a bird, to a building, to something. What that something is is entirely unclear, and Braes himself doesn’t have an answer.

He painted many of the images of upward-glancing people while on a month-long residency at Yaddo, the artists residency in upstate New York. When it came time to show his work to his fellow artists, many of them assumed that the paintings evoked September 11th—that they were images of people in Manhattan staring up as the World Trade Center came down. It is easy to see this in the paintings, but in fact the thought had never occurred to Braes.

“The heads looking up—I’m not exactly sure why, it just happened and I went with it,” he explains. “If I make something specific, it’s not interesting to me anymore, in the way I need it to be interesting.” The need for an open mind while painting is what Braes feels separates him from being just a journeyman building a chest of drawers for a specific client. (Images of his father and the wallpaper and grain doors come to my mind as he explains.) He returns once again to his larger theme, the escape from being enslaved by commercialism, “that you’re not stuck in the professional realm, which is deadly.”

What is it that he is interested in, I ask? Survivors. The working-class. “That’s who I represent—the under-known. That’s my culture,” he says, more to his paintings than to me. The question, then, is how to level the playing field, while rising to the top. In this vein, Braes seeks to create “something that will exist on its own terms, usually. So that, regardless who looks at something, you don’t need to exclude the uneducated, or uninitiated.”

After a late morning at Braes’ new studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, replete with tea and delicious biscuits and bread, Braes drops me off at the train station.

“I don’t know if you got anything from this meeting,” he tells me. “I just hope I don’t sound like an asshole.”

Hardly. There is a tension to our conversations, a sense that he wants to speak endlessly about the holy act of painting and creating, but at the same time is aware that a quotation given to an interviewer is somehow a depletion of the artist’s power.

But I did come away with something, a great deal in fact, most of which isn’t easily put into words. It wasn’t so much that what Braes says is entirely new or newfound, but rather, that he truly means what he said—each word. One line came back to me as I sat on the subway, heading back into Manhattan. “Good paintings keep you straight. That’s one of the reasons I paint.” I left Braes’ company refreshed, imbued with a sense of painting as necessity, and with a fear that Braes may be one of a dying breed—the artist who paints because he must.

The work of Lex Braes can be seen in the coming months in Dusseldorf at the Felix Ringel Galerie.