Time to Saddle/Gear Up

Does it ever strike you as odd, that the sage advice passed down to us by generations can be so... conveniently opportunistic?

For example, while one is encouraged to overcome the difficulty/complacency and 'get back on the horse' for things that they should be doing, but have stopped for one reason or another, we are also told that other tasks are 'like riding a bike' in that, no matter what our reason for ceasing that activity at some prior date, renewing it presents no real challenge.

A horse is a living creature that won't generally go leaping off cliffs or running into walls on its own accord, while a bicycle separates us from serious gravity-induced bodily harm only by two wheels and our own fallible sense of balance.

I am only suggesting that the danger and ease of use between these two modes of 'pedal' transport does not correspond with colloquial common sense.

The 'Lame Texpatriot' blog begun in September 2008, following an interesting (and occasionally enlightening) 3 month trip backpacking around Eastern Europe. I cataloged my exploits, and more often, my understanding and curiosity about those exploits, on a blog called Weber on the Lamb, and upon my return to 'normalcy' attempted to continue that degree of contemplation about the everyday events in which I subsequently submerged.

Graduate school is a good time for thinking, and doing so in New York City affords one plenty of opportunities to spice up the monologue with excerpts from the many bizarrities with which New Yorkers are daily confronted: Pillow fights, Midnight Elephants, Newark.

Upon graduation, I took my diploma, new wife and great aspirations to Washington, D.C., where a blissful summer of exploration ensued. But as the months piled up, the funds ran low, and the job interviews remained painfully sparse, my ability to revel in the eccentricities of modern life dissipated. I needed work; I needed connections to get work; and I needed to get serious about getting connections so I could get work.

I started a new blog, Shashlykistan, focused on my intended professional work in Central Asian politics (yes, you can technically do that for a living, though I'm still struggling to prove it), joined the twitter-verse, read a lot of regional news, and tried to add something to all the racket.

In November 2010, I stopped what had been an almost-weekly 2 year experiment in audio/radio-blogging, WSRP - the 'Weber Surrogate Radio Project'. Shortly thereafter, following one final gasp to make light out of a pleasantly bizarre Thanksgiving spent with a friend's in-laws-to-be in December, Lame Texpatriot also fell silent: left to the dustbin of disregarded digits; banished to the purgatory of inactive websites alongside Metacrawler, Angelfire, and AOL.

But the fun thing about life, which I have discovered over and over again, is that, with but one biographical exception, it keeps on going. I don't mean to be morbid - or insensitive - only to suggest that one's fortunes, preferences, and habits will always have the potential to change until that one fateful moment when we quit this mortal realm, and after that, frankly, what do we care if we leave behind remnant cyberspace ephemera?

I'm not sure if this blog post represents any change to the status quo for the past 6 months, or just one more desperate attempt to pretend like I actually write a blog. You see, I can't tell if I'm trying to get back up on a Horse, or a Bicycle.

It's an important difference, and for obvious reasons. A Bicycle will not 'Woah', and a Horse will not willingly let you check it's air pressure.

Less metaphorically, it's a question of just how much effort is required to resume a pattern once one is out of it. I heard that it usually takes 3 weeks to quit or start a habit. Seems to me that makes once-a-month habits a little too easy. So I'm aiming just a little higher, and will try to supply these infinite pages with a modicum more content, hopefully to the tune of 2-4 posts per month. Henceforth, the pages of Lame Texpatriot will still, technically, stay infinitely empty - that's just math - but perhaps it will be a more entertaining infinity to stare at than the static abyss it has been of recent months.

I do now have a job, as does my wife, health insurance, and are soon to quit our subterranean abode. While DC rent continues to be ridiculous, at least our situation now prevents it from being full-on blog-stopping in its crushing financial girth.

WSRP is coming back too, with a special 75th episode memorial tribute to Billy Bang, a phenomenal Jazz violinist and a personal hero of mine.

And Shashlykistan keeps rumbling along, in fits and spurts. An outlet for me to voice an opinion on things for which I am barely qualified, to an audience of people who just might need to hire a junior Central Asia specialist - someday. It's a long-term plan, with the short-term benefit that my exceedingly patient wife need not sit through every reaction I formulate to the latest parliamentary developments in Bishkek, or the most recent LNG pipeline predictions to leak out of Ashgabat.

And perhaps more importantly, to both myself and to you, life keeps going.

All the best, and thanks for bothering to check in every 6 months or so.

Your Devoted,

Lame Texpatriot

Beethoven Turkey Cinema: The Unlikely 2010 Thanksgiving of Ryan & Shelley

The Thanksgiving holiday is a rather odd American tradition in which we stop our regular lives mid-week, engage in often extraordinary pursuit of simultaneous long-distance travel, and then give ourselves licence to gorge on food and television for at least 1, and oftentimes as many as 4 consecutive days. It kicks off an orgy of materialist economy, and is often bracketed with spectacles from giant balloon mascots to interstate sports rivalries.

Growing up, my family split Thanksgiving holidays between our South Texas Webers, and the Oklahoma Webbers (it's a long story, but for the record, it involves no intermarriage, but has dubbed my brothers and I the "3-b Web[b]er Boys"). In a move that I'm sure is quite common among the decreasing number of American nuclear families, we alternated Thanksgiving and Christmas so that one was spent each year with one side, and then the holidays flipped the next year.

The two families were located in neighboring states, but separated by 500 miles of interstate highway, a straight shot down I-35 from OKC to San Antonio. As a result, they were both culturally similiar, yet geographically distant. Another marked difference was that the OKC Webbers (et al) were exclusively "city folk," being that they grew up and lived in major urban centers their entire lives. The Texas Webers (who are much more numerous) are a different story, residing mostly in semi-rural cities like Hondo, Uvalde or Castroville. Don't mis-read; thanks to cable TV, the internet, etc. they are all very much members of the 21st century, and most no longer live and work on farms and ranches. But many grew up in those environs, and many more stayed close, or even returned to them, after time in San Antonio, Houston, or NYC.

Strange as it is, the Webber/Weber contrast of metropolitan and "ruro-politan" communities provided me with some of the most dramatic culture clashes of my pre-college life (it's Oklahoma, people, we aren't known for diversity).

Example #1 - In Oklahoma, my father, an oil & gas attorney - wore olive slacks, yellow button-downs, and paisley ties, went by "Jim" and signed paperwork as "James William Weber." Anywhere south of Dallas, he was "Jimmy" (usually pronounced "Jim-eh"), wore jeans, and on more than one occasion, squeezed into the very old cowboy boots he still keeps in the back of his closet.

Example #2 - In Texas, children over the age of 12 were allowed to pour their fathers (and mothers) a jack-and-coke at the card table in the garage that served as the event's open bar. My Oklahoma family didn't serve alcohol on holidays. This even included the grand annual vaudevillian affair, The Webber Musicale, a caroling/recital/talent show tradition that continues to shock and amaze the uninitiated that such a thing could even exist, let alone as a dry event.

In addition to the requisite warmth of shared family bonds, the two things that both sides of the singular Web[b]er family coin had in common when it came to the holidays were Turkey and Football. Again, I don't want to assume this is universal in American culture, but it is certainly common. Ham makes a strong bid for Christmas time, but we Web[b]ers like our turkey, and the Webbber boys are no exception.

This brings us (finally) to the odd circumstances of my past 3 thanksgivings, in which professional commitments or personal budget has disallowed me from sharing the celebration of over-indulgence with either of these factions of my heritage.

One Fine Day

I am having a good day.

This morning I woke up early, and attended a presentation at the National Democracy Insititute, a major player in international political development/ democracy promotion. They were recapping the November 7 elections in authoritarian Burma, but more than that, they were demonstrating a new project/ platform that combined GIS mapping reported elections fraud with first-person narrative citizen reporting of the events. Rapid, compelling, grassroots, and almost NPRish in its earnestness. The application in Burma - a country with relatively limited communications tech and a highly repressive regime - was only tangentially of interest to me. Mostly, I wanted to know about its application in other, less severe, environments (like those in Central Asia where I am more interested).

After the presentation, I met with the NDI staff responsible for their Kyrgyz programs, and got to talk a little "shop" with him in the lobby. I'm working on some independent research, and having trouble getting access to a few government reports which this new contact, Alex, volunteered to help me locate. Double-plus.

We were interrupted, briefly, by Ian Schuler, one of the panelists and the guy behind the new technology platform. He found my questions intriguing, and wanted to follow up with me about the challenges of application outside Burma and discuss what systemic biases they might encounter. I handed out a few business cards, then had to be on my way. Like I have for the past 2 months, I had 5.5 hours of work to do as a receptionist at the World Resources Institute.

It was raining, so for the first time in almost 3 weeks, I didn't ride a Capital Bikeshare rent-a-bike over to the offices near Union Station. Since joining the annual membership in mid-September, I've saved $104 in metro fare. Minus the $50 annual membership and the $26 I paid for a helmet, and I'm already $28 in the black, with a few weeks of fall and all of Spring and Summer still to take advantage.

At work, I started the day as I always do reviewing news relevant to Central Asia, and posting an item of interest on my new twitter feed - @richardrweber. It's not designed to be a fun, personal kind of twitter. It is very professionally oriented, and almost exclusively designed to get me better connected with other regional experts in the hopes that this leads to a job. Toward that end, it's been pretty successful. Back in October, I also started a new blog - Shashlykistan - which is also devoted to my semi-professional analysis of Kyrgyz and Central Asian political, economic and social developments. Initially, it was a way to force me to keep up with events, and hone some writing, research, and analytic skills. With the holding of parliamentary elections in Kyrgyzstan on October 10, I found myself opportunely positioned to access and write about these elections, and their resulting parliament. Much of what I discovered had not previously been mentioned in other news sources, so I passed it along to some contacts I have in Bishkek, Prague, and professors at Columbia.

Sanity Rally pt 3 - Politics as Unusual

In the lead up to Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington DC on October 30, it seems the major media talking points were:

1. What secret political message would Jon Stewart insert into his supposedly 'apolitical' event?
2. What impact would he have on the upcoming Midterm elections?

No matter how much he protested, or how many different news outlets he appeared on - Larry King Live, NPR's Fresh Air - no one believed Jon Stewart when he (repeatedly) promised that his rally would not be political in content.

And low-and-behold, it wasn't. There were Zero politicians involved in the rally, no political talking points, and no references (snide or supporting) to political candidates. A day before Halloween, and there wasn't even a single Christine O'Donnell/ Witch joke.

Stewart & company went to great length to deliver exactly what they promised - a major rally in the nation's capital just 3 days before the midterm election that wasn't about politics.

Real Conversations about False Politics

On the eve of the US midterm elections, I decided to write a letter to my grandfather-in-law. Like many of his generation, and many on my side of the family as well, Paul aligns - loosely- as a conservative. Even that labels is inadequate, as it suggests adherence to a variety of social, political, and economic affiliations that I don't even know how he feels about. We've never discussed abortion, the death penalty, education policy, unwed motherhood, FCC regulatory policy, privacy rights, gun rights, marriage rights, or really many of the other hot-button political cliches.

We've talked about the military - Paul was a lifelong Army man - and generally agree that the men and women in uniform deserve almost unending respect and leaders worthy of their commitment.

Mostly, our discussions have pivoted not so much on issues, but rather on politics itself, with the media - and here I mean explicitly Fox News - as the driving element. Paul watches Fox, and again, I don't want that to suggest that he agrees with everything said on that 24/7 talk machine. I get most of my US news from the New York Times, NPR, or - I have to admit - the Daily Show. I also don't always align exactly with the manner in which certain stories are covered, or the editorial choices of what is - or is not - newsworthy.

But on this Election Day 2010, I wanted to share some of my thoughts with Paul, after receiving a series of e-mails from him over the past few months in the run up to the election. That e-mail - edited to omit family banter and add some context - appears below, and in it I put forward some of my observations. These come from attending recent 'non-political' rallies held in DC by Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart, as well as daily monitoring of various on-line news sources throughout the closing months of the campaign. It also builds on my studies - and ideal career path - as an international democracy promotions analyst, helping foreign countries install, fortify, and improve systems of electoral democracy. What one finds often in such work is that 'golden rules' of democracy abroad - like nonpartisan elections committees and identifiable campaign contributors - are often ignored at home.