It’s not an uncommon situation. Being in a foreign country, clumsily trying to navigate the native language, and receiving blank stares – or, scowls – in return.
That’s exactly what Deborah Fallows – wife of famed journalist James Fallows – describes in her recent interview on NPR and writes about in her new book Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language. When Fallows accompanied her husband to China, she had taken a few semesters of Mandarin. But when they arrived, she found it a real challenge to communicate.
Fallows is no stranger to foreign tongues. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics and speaks half-a-dozen languages. But she learned there’s an art to mastering a tonal language in which one syllable can have many, many meanings. And more often than not, Fallows felt she was mastering the art of miscommunication.
In one humorous anecdote, the author describes her effort to order “take-out” – or “dabao” from a Shanghai Taco Bell. She tries every possible tonal combination, but the server couldn’t understand her request. He finally retrieved three other employees from the back, and Fallows continued to repeat dabao, dabao, dabao to them. Finally – finally! – one of the men said “ah, dabao!” And, just like that, she struck the chord and got her tacos to go.
For Fallows, hitting the right note was a cultural journey. But in communications, being on-key is everything. You just can’t afford to be tone-deaf.
It is no news now, but on Tuesday last week, President Obama delivered the least effective Oval Office address since Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. Why?
It wasn’t just the awkward use of his hands, the hackneyed and inappropriate wartime metaphors, the equally banal “if we could land a man on the moon” drivel. All that was bad enough, but more devastating was the gulf between obvious fact and the speech’s fiction. Read
Researchers in Bangkok, Thailand just released a new study that found exposing children to Popeye the Sailor Man has a strong impact on their eating habits.
New scientific research found that children who watched Popeye shoveling spinach into his mouth before fighting his rival Bruto, doubled their vegetable intake. Watching episodes of the cartoon was just part of a larger experiment, conducted by researchers at Mahidol University. Children also engaged in planting vegetable seeds, fruit and vegetable parties, and cooking with vegetables.
The research concluded that the 26 child volunteers maintained a more visibly healthy diet following their exposure to Popeye. Experts recorded the four and five year olds eating two portions of vegetables in the days before the study and four portions after watching the cartoon.
Popeye the Sailor Man is credited with saving the spinach industry during the Great Depression. Perhaps re-runs of Popeye is just the policy prescription we need today.
Summer is the season of vacations. And for many Americans, time spent away in the mountains, lakes, and oceans is where families reunite, make memories and establish traditions. Having just returned from a vacation with my own family, I’m reminded that vacationing in the United States has a distinct history that dates back to the early 19th century.
As historian Cindy Aron recounts in her book Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States, the rise of vacations in America is “embedded in a familiar history of the United States,” as we shifted from an agrarian to an industrial nation, developed of a mass-transportation system, and saw the rise of the middle class. But what’s more interesting about the American story of vacationing is what Aron describes as the “love/hate battle” Americans have with vacations. Read
I recently met with a possible client, and as part of a larger communications strategy, I suggested his business consider hosting a small policy dinner with an elite group of writers and scholars. I was met with a strange reaction – laughing. He understood op-eds, speeches, even conferences. But a dinner? How is that going to help advance our issue campaign?
White House Writers Group has been organizing policy dinners for years, but using a meal as a platform to influence opinion has a much longer history in the nation’s capital. Dinner parties in Washington have been the source of politics and politicking since the days of Thomas Jefferson. As Catherine Allgor, the author of Parlor Politics writes, “Historians have long recognized the political advantages of Jefferson’s dinners, calling them part of his statecraft.”
Jefferson was strategic with his dinner parties, giving them throughout the political “season,” or Congressional session. He typically hosted guests from one political party at a time, careful not to mix Republicans and Federalists. But these were not official state dinners, the way we’re accustomed to hearing about today. Rather, they were intended to be much more “democratic” and generally reflected the president’s casual, Virginia hospitality. Jefferson’s dinners espoused democracy, always using a round table, for instance, to encourage easy conversation, intimacy, and equality.
The act of breaking bread with others helps merge the personal with the political, engage in debate, bridge differences, and move opinion. And in Washington, it appears, we have a long tradition of using food to advance political change.
The summer hasn’t started out so well for President Obama. He has suffered a constant barrage from critics on both the right and the left who claim he has failed to show leadership when it comes to the Gulf oil spill. Not surprisingly, with all this hostility, the president’s poll numbers have started to slip.
Now, mid-June, Gallup finds that the President’s job approval rating is 46 percent. Just two days after the President’s Oval Office address, Rasmussen Reports found 61 percent of voters “view the president’s handling of the oil leak crisis as poor.”
Near double-digit unemployment, robust opposition to the health care overhaul, an unrelenting war in Afghanistan, and now the BP oil spill has generated consistent bad press for the president. More and more, his critics claim he is ineffectual.
The president is in trouble, and many wonder whether he can escape from what seems to be political quicksand. No matter the speech he gives, pundits and political elites just keep repeating that he is sinking — and quickly.
In the bible of public-opinion research, The Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion, John Zaller demonstrates that periodically the “flow of political communication really is…heavily one-sided.” By examining shifts in public opinion after the flow of political communication becomes two-sided, he demonstrates that public opinion is the product of information flowing from elites to the masses.
Over the course of the past few months, elite discourse has almost unanimously declared that President Obama is faltering. And critics on both sides have hit the president. Free-marketers have lambasted Obama for the stimulus package, the new health care law, and his decision to stop off-shore drilling in the wake of the oil spill. But criticism is not limited to the right. The MSNBC chastisement following the president’s address on Tuesday night certainly did not go unnoticed. In effect, there has been a one-sided, decidedly negative, flow of information to the American public.
One problem Obama is learning is that campaign rhetoric can’t carry a presidency. As Greg Sargent explains in the Washington Post yesterday, the public doesn’t care that Obama hasn’t shown more emotion or anger over the Gulf oil spill. Rather, they’re “concerned about the substance of the response.”
If the president wants to interrupt the conversation, in which an elite consensus has emerged around the “belief” that Obama is faltering because of his inability to act effectively, he needs to demonstrate his leadership – strongly and consistently. This is the only way he’ll generate a two-sided flow of information and change the conversation. If he does that, the White House can expect a clear, decisive upswing in the public’s approval of the president.
I’m a big fan of Broadway shows. So I should enjoy the Tony Awards show. And I do — last night’s show had particularly good performances from La Cage, Memphis and Million-Dollar Quartet. But something always bothers me about the Tonys. More than any of the other award ceremonies – the Oscar, the Emmy, the Grammy, even the MTV Awards – the Tony is an “insider” occasion. The speeches of presenters and award winners both are laced with inside references, and even more with insider “emotions” — a frequent assumption that everyone listening to them understands their cultural references, and maybe even that those who don’t understand don’t count.
It’s easy to understand the homogeneous nature of the Broadway community. They work hard to get to the top — usually a lot harder than in the other popular entertainment forms — and the financial rewards and recognition generally don’t match movies, TV etc. Read
Who said spin is just for politicians?
A new movement to reinvent the modern American cemetery is making its way across the country. According to news reports, burial grounds are tired of their teary-eyed reputation, so they’re shedding this forbidding face for something a little, well, livelier.
When it comes down to it, it’s all a matter of perspective. As one Colorado cemetery manager told a local reporter, “People come to cemeteries, and they are always looking down.” But if they looked up, they might notice the century old history, plant life and culture that infuse the graveyard.
The trend is not simply to offer tours, like the ones you can arrange at cemeteries like Père Lachaise in Paris or Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, DC. Instead it’s to turn the focus away from death and toward – for lack of a better word – life.
Fireworks, jazz concerts, and art exhibits are some of the kinds of social events cemeteries are planning to help draw in visitors. Friends will be encouraged to take pleasure in the historic trees and rose gardens that flank many burial grounds. And many cemeteries are hoping to be a place where communities can gather in times of joy, rather than sorrow.
In Washington, we might call it spin. But cemeteries are refashioning themselves in a new light – hoping they can be a place of solemnity, as well as inspiration.
The White House has an entire office devoted to protocol, led by the social secretary, to oversee every White House function from bill signings to state dinners.
So what’s the protocol when it comes to giving a speech in the rain? Well, that depends on just how much rain is in the forecast.
Torrential downpours and crashing thunder at Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois yesterday (literally) drowned out President Obama’s Memorial Day remarks.
Politico reports Obama was “huddled under a white tent off to the side of the stage as the rain drove down.” Holding an umbrella, he told service members and their families in attendance, “‘We are a little bit concerned about lightening. This may not be safe.’”
When it was clear the rain wasn’t a passing summer storm, the president canceled the speech and instead visited with audience members inside parked busses.
Of course the president was already under attack for another more serious breach of protocol: shirking his national responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief in favor of a little weekend-getaway back home.
Today, the social secretary just may be looking into some sturdier umbrellas.
A California PR man demonstrates that high-touch contact with the press is not the best way to go.