An Impactful Appointee
The new administration has kept THE SCRAPBOOK busy these past few weeks: So much Hope and Change in the air, so many new names and faces to learn! But every now and then a familiar figure swings into view, and THE SCRAPBOOK is appropriately gratified. So you can imagine our reaction when we learned that Dr. Johnetta B. Cole has just been named to head the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art on the Mall.
What, you've never heard of the National Museum of African Art? Maybe that's because, as the Washington Post explains, it draws more children than adults because of (in the Post's delicate formulation) "its strong education programs." Surely it couldn't be because of its small, undistinguished collection. After all, according to the Post, the National Museum of African Art "has a collection of 9,000 objects, including 500 items obtained from the Walt Disney Co. in 2005." The Disney acquisition, the Post helpfully points out, "was seen as a validation of the museum's status."
To which THE SCRAPBOOK adds: If a truckload of art from Walt Disney won't silence skeptics about the National Museum of African Art, surely the recruitment of Dr. Johnetta B. Cole should do the trick.
To begin with, unlike many museum directors, Dr. Cole actually likes those things they hang on the wall: "There are too many people who make the fallacious statement that this art stuff is not fundamental, not essential to our lives," she says. "I think it is." And it isn't just this art stuff that motivates Dr. Cole. The former president of Spelman College in Atlanta and Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., has spent the past several years as chairman of the Johnetta B. Cole Global Diversity and Inclusion Institute at Bennett College, where "we realize the boldness of our efforts to advance and support access and opportunity for everyone to fully utilize their differences to make a difference."
Dr. Cole is one of the Johnetta B. Cole Global Diversity and Inclusion Institute's featured motivational speakers ("Bring an impactful message to your next event") and, of course, a member of the board of directors of Home Depot, Merck & Co., and NationsBank South, as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where she has "consistently addressed issues of racial and gender discrimination."
Curiously absent from all this inspiring data about Dr. Cole is the equally interesting fact that she was, for many years, a member of the national committee of the Venceremos Brigade, an organization that sends young admirers on sugar cane-harvesting expeditions to Fidel Casto's Cuba, and is closely connected to Cuban intelligence. Or her presence on the executive board of the U.S. Peace Council, a virulently anti-American creature of the Cold War with KGB links. Indeed, in the early 1990s, Dr. Cole's radical connections sent such an impactful message to the Clinton administration that it hastily dropped plans to appoint her secretary of education.
But now, all is forgiven. Wayne Clough, secretary of the Smithsonian, is "delighted" with his choice of Dr. Cole and looks forward "to working with her in her new role and in finding opportunities to use her talents to help with pan-institutional activities." And not just about that art stuff, either: We expect that Dr. Cole's diverse Cuban/Soviet experience will send an impactful message to the occasional adult who visits her museum, and that Dr. Cole herself will "fully utilize [her] differences to make a difference"--with taxpayers' money, of course.
Giving Odierno His Due
The Washington Post has the generous practice of serializing books by featured reporters--Bob Woodward being the most tedious example--on its front page. The latest beneficiary is Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), whose new book ( The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq) attempts to ex-plain the success of the surge and subsequent political/military progress in today's Iraq.
THE SCRAPBOOK congratulates Ricks on the publication of his new book, and wishes him well. But in the Post serialization he informs readers that "this account of the military's internal struggle over the direction of the Iraq war is based on dozens of interviews with [Gen. Ray] Odierno, Petraeus and other U.S. officials" and that "Odierno's role has not been previously reported."
Up to a point. It is true that The Gamble--in time-honored Washington Post fashion--tends to concentrate on the behind-the-scenes maneuvering in Washington more than the battlefronts in Iraq, but readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD learned all about General Odierno and how the surge was working (see for instance our July 9, 2007, cover and our March 10, 2008, article "The Patton of Counterinsurgency") long before Thomas E. Ricks put pen to paper, thanks to the detailed accounts of Frederick and Kimberly Kagan reporting from Iraq.
Daniel Seligman, 1924-2009 THE SCRAPBOOK was sorry to read of the death of Daniel Seligman, whose "Keeping Up" column was for years not just the best thing in
Fortune magazine, but the best column of its kind in American journalism and an unacknowledged influence on our own efforts. Though the tone was unfailingly light and witty, the man swung a mean bat, often against his journalistic cohort. And he pioneered the use of the Nexis database as a tool of media criticism. Here is a typical sample from the April 29, 1996, edition of
Fortune:
We were 6 years old the first time we watched a schoolyard bully in action. It was a cement yard adjoining P.S. 166 in Manhattan, and we remember the holy terror quite clearly. We will warily not mention his name, however, as there is at least some possibility he is still alive after the years he has presumably spent brawling in bars and getting into tire-iron fights with motorists who cut off his car. Sociology being excluded from the first-grade curriculum, we had not yet assimilated "self-esteem" into our vocabulary. But thinking back on the lout years later, we were pretty sure he had more of it than we did. We are surer than ever after reading an utterly fascinating report on self-esteem in the latest issue of -Psychological Review. . . . [subtitled] "The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem." Friends, there really is a dark side--even if it is hard to discern in the endless public palaver on the subject. A Nexis search on March 26 yielded up 3,847 articles invoking "self-esteem" that had been added to the database just since year-end. A serious sampling of the articles turned up none questioning esteem's quintessential wonderfulness and centrality in human affairs. A Village Voice entry worries that low self-esteem leads innocent suspects to confess. An AP feature earnestly attributes a wave of suicides among French police officers to their low self-esteem. The New York Times approvingly reports that Little League coaches are now being trained to raise kids' self-esteem as well as bunting skills. Articles in the Arizona Republic and a lot of other places tell us that kids join violent gangs because they lack self-esteem.
The Psychological Review paper is long (29 pages), fact-freighted, and totally inconsistent with the above blather. . . . Specifically, the profs tell us that high levels of self-esteem are often associated with violent, aggressive behavior. . . . "Gang members apparently think, talk, and act like people with high self-esteem, and there is little to support the view that they are humble or self-deprecating or even that they are privately full of insecurities and self-doubts." . . . In and out of schoolyards, their mindset can leave them thinking they are entitled to steal from and beat up others, also that they can get away with it.