Tag: Richard Nixon

Shared dishes

Suzie Wong. Suzie Q. Lazy Suzan.

All the S’s in stereotypes. All boils down to a round table full of shared dishes, each could easily meet  your dai;ly cholesterol quota.

Half roasted duck, half chicken ginger etc….

Hong Kong cuisine, served in Herndon (VA).

I thought about Nixon’s trip to China, and how many shared dishes he tasted then.

Now, we got Huawei branch in Herndon selling Symantec data storage equipment.

And Haier dorm fridges, well situated inside American campuses.

Right when Hollywood lamented the great days of “Emperor” (Gen MacArthur), the other empire has made inroads here, one dish at a time.

For here or for here?

It’s best to have it “for here” for these sorts of dishes (and fried rice to go).

Kids chowed down the rice, eyes glued to the I-pad’s screen.

(I-pad perhaps made in China also).

There you have it: the consequences of Ping Pong diplomacy (Ford exported – “ping” – cars to China, and Chinese goods “pong” back).

Those who trade tend not to fight (Bastiat’s Principle).

When we got here in the mid-70’s, there hardly was any “chinese” grocery stores. Now, several Lotte supermarkets are found in Loudoun Co.

Hyundai and Kia are sold side by side with Fiat and Audi.

Chinese buffet and American buffet. No ordinary Sunday.

Follow the money. Use all your resources. Cook up some secret sauce. Suzie Q, Suzie Wong, but be not Lazy Suzan.

Hard work and hard-earned money.

It’s all here, even in times of Sequestration.

Yes. There will be challenges in brand acceptance. Who wouldn’t! Ever heard of the horse-meat scandal in the UK and IKEA?

The story of WTO has many chapters, and each with its own sub-plots, full of conflicts. But in the end, let’s say 50 years from now, we hope to see a more humane and harmonious society around that same table, sharing dishes. Well, if India and China don’t go at each other in a contest for supremacy.

Learning by failing

NYT Opinion Page wants to debate about being informed vs being educated.

With the dcline of Newsweek, readers have moved on to Google News (ironically, today celebrates National Print Day) and other mobile content.

Short bursts: Obama won the debate. The Giants got chemistry.

We will someday think that a tweet, 140 characters, is too long.

Just like the 2-minute  microwave oven wait (used to shorten boiling time down to 2 minutes from 5).

That’s how quick our brain evolves

Yet there is no substitute for trying and failing.

Those lessons stuck around longer, since they are more personal.

Time we could have spent with our kids.

Money we could have invested in an art course that could help turn passion into profit etc… Yet, we only have regrets to show for.

In business, we missed a few steps: being too late to market, or too early.

Committing too few resources to a gigantic task (thinking we were exceptions to the rule such as Valley of Death, burnt rates etc…).

Failing begets failing.

We all hide our weakness and failure.

The culture of celeb and cinema extolls IMAGE (of heroism and hedonism).

We are supposed to be cool, hip and always on point.

In life, it’s only one take. Action and cut. And that’s a wrap.

Those who rehearsed more will get  it righ the first time.

Either way, no pain no gain.

We rehearse i.e. fumbling through, learning a new angle , a new way to interpret the script.

Life has its own script for us: put in the hours, get something back. Spend wisely and save for rainy days.

That script is universal.

Yet we keep having to relearn it. Mostly, by failing to adhere to it.

But then, whose life is it that doesn’t stray from the track? McGovern of S Dakota?

Bush of Austin, TX? or Arnold in Hollywood.  Everyone seems to have a book out. All learned by doing, by failing. The WSJ titled McGovern “Bested by Nixon“.

Will your life and mine be remembered by one defining failure? Then why do we need a whole book? Save a tree.  Just tweet, something like: I THOUGHT I WAS AN EXCEPTION TO THE RULE. I WAS NOT. HARD EARNED LESSONS.

Now go celebrate National Print Day. Read about others’ struggles and striving. How they handled their own failures.

Maybe we can learn by their failing besides our own.

Transparent trail

I saved up my visual history in 3/4 inch, VHS, slides, prints, CDs, hard-drive, flashdrive and cloud.

Not so much for me, but for my daughters .

That collage documented my fits and starts.

Each person is a narrative whose ending remains a mystery ( ‘in my end, is my beginning”).

In the Year of Magical Thinking, the widow-writer kept wishing that her husband would return (hence, magical ),

and refused to give his stuffs away.

The hard part about closure is to get through denial.

We have come a long way, since Watergate (White House secret taping) to Wikileaks.

The best way to avoid having some thing bad traced back to you is not to leave one in the first place.

What is whispered shall be announced from the roof top.

I blogged about de-clutterization. But this time, it’s not about our hoarding habit (fax machine?).

It’s about using whatever format or latest update (Adobe) as tool and transparency as policy.

Companies spent enormous amount of time, energy and money to whip up great-looking “About us”.

Until prospective customers detected incongruity and inconsistency  (reputational lag).

We live our digital lives one day at a time in open-source mode, with myriads of combinations to collaborate and co-create (the sharing economy).  We will have to relearn TRUST as online currency before Web 3.0 can happen (co-create).

The twin brother-in-law of Congress woman Giffords said on CBS: “from space, I saw this beautiful planet and I wouldn’t guess there were so much – bad things such as random shooting – going on . We can do better “.

Out in open space, with no one watching, one presumes, like Nixon, that misspoken words are not coming back to haunt.

But in cyberspace, the opposite is true. We do live our virtual lives with more-real-than-real-life ramifications. We leave behind our digital fingerprints and carbon footprints, together form a narrative, to be mined years from now by “bots”. Faint-of-hearts need not apply! (as of this edit, Apple just purchased a company whose software can pinpoint where we have been i.e. GPS plus past footprints to predict our next likely frequent stops).

Left, Right, Gone!

Jody Powell, Press Secretary under the Carter Administration, died a few years ago.

William Safire, speech writer for President Nixon, also passed away soon afterwards.

These two men left a legacy of words.

Mr Safire was remembered more than his B/W iconic PR photo of the Cold War:

He left us with a Dictionary of Political Terms.

If we included Mr Cronkite into this communication pantheon, then we got a Press Secretary, a Speech writer, and a Newscaster. Left, right and center (supposedly).

I was struck by what the author of “the Middle of Everywhere” wrote:  ” On 9/11, the book I had just finished seemed meaningless”. She went on to quote Buddha ( when asked about the effect of the Enlightenment), as saying “before Enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. After Enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.)

ABC News went on after Peter Jennings, and soon will after  Charles Gibson. At 6:30PM M-F, on the dot.

We go on living our lives, chopping wood and carrying water, but we remember and owe them a debt of gratitude for their contribution in the field of communication.

Call it selective memory: imagery, idea and information about them.

There is a new book about being “Connected”. And one of the central ideas is that our choices somehow get influenced by friends of friends, and that it’s those people who are a few degrees of separation from us who impact us more than our immediate connection.

Every generation of technology brings out doubters and contrarians e.g. cell phones will fry your brain, the microwave oven is causing cancer, the computer screen isolates the person (as if fast-food alone couldn’t bring about a bowling-alone nation).

But the social animals went on to find each other on Plenty-of-fish or Match.com, LinkedIn, Gather, Facebook.

There are studies which show that people are more honest when writing about themselves (than in a face-to-face meeting which tends to be more appearance-focus).

The L, R, and C communicators were of the TV generation, whose audience (viewers) decline with each passing day.

At least, they knew how to handle the ” cool” medium (visual-oriented but demands some  imagination and participation by  viewers). They knew how to “show”  viewers when the news are unfolded ” that’s the way it was”.

Speech was loaded into a teleprompter. Remember the iconic Kennedy-Nixon televised debate  (many critics thought Kennedy victory was attributed largely to his charisma, a more trustworthy image than Nixon’s sweaty and eye-slanting).

Then came the peanut grower from Georgia, with warm sweater which reminded us of Mr Roger (Mr Carter actually taught Sunday School ).

And the viewers ate it up, just as quickly as they would jump ship 4 years later for a more telegenic actor from California:

“A shinning city on the hill”.

“Give me your poor and tired “. The Lady (of Liberty) says one thing, Mr Wilson in Congress says another( “you lie”.)

Had the Mayflower been turned away then. There wouldn’t be any Thanksgiving in South Carolina as we know it today.

Someone did pay forward. And it’s time we think of paying back, and in Mr Safire’s case, a Dictionary of Political Terms.