WWHD? What Would Halley Do?
Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 20 May 2004
I give an interview today by phone to Rolling Stone's Amanda Griscom for a June issue story on Iraq. Actually, it's going to be a compilation of interviews with various national security figures, to include General Brent Scowcroft, Senator Richard Lugar, Rand Beers, Wesley Clark, Fouad Ajami, and Sir Jeremy Greenstock. The interview consisted of a series of big-picture questions on Iraq and how that scenario may unfold in coming months. Our answers will presumably be compared in the piece.
It was a pretty easy effort on my part: phone call and she tapes on her end. They will edit down the answers in terms of length but promise to do no selective removal of text. Fair enough. I get examples of questions beforehand, but decide against thinking it over in advance. Better to hear them fresh and simply answer in real time. Plus, Amanda was cool about exploring the book as much as sticking to her script.
And yes, I did offer to pose nude if he would get me the cover. As with previous attempts with Esquire, this failed miserably.
I even offered to do something with a Start Trek motif, building off the AP story, but no dice.
Speaking of the AP story, let me say that it was Matt Kelley himself who was so ardently intrigued by my mentioning of Star Trek at several points in the book. Now, you have to keep things in perspective: the book is about 150,000 words spread over more than 400 pages, and I reference Star Trek about five times. I also reference the Green Bay Packers that many times, and Charleton Heston sci-fi movies at least 3 times (Soylent Green once and Planet of the Apes twice). So I guess I could have been described as a Heston fanatic or a Cheesehead (actually, people from Wisconsin prefer the phrase persona au gratin, if you must know).
So if we're going to talk fanaticism, I guess you might assume I'm a gun-toting member of the NRA (Heston tie), but you'd be wrong.
Then again, I have long begged Esquire to let me do a story on Brett Favre (presumably he'd get naked on the cover), so you'd be right about the Cheesehead thing.
Anyway, of course my local rag the Newport Daily News, which seems to have a thing about making me seem ridiculous (they ran a rather snarky profile of me after Esquire's Best & Brightest selection), ran an abbreviated version of the article (without this URL listed!) under the title, "Pentagon Taps Navy "Trekkie."
Yeaaah (as Dr. Evil might drawl) . . . . rrrrrrrriiiiiiight.
Yes, that was the logical title. I'm not a serious analyst, just a Klingon-spouting utopian who's fired too many phasers in his day. My local newspaper folks!
Thank you … thank you very much!
Thankfully, the version of the article that appeared in today's Early Bird (Pentagon clipping service) was that from the Philadelphia Inquirer (and yes, I do hate the Eagles and everything they represent). It's title was "Viewing New World With A Larger Lens:
Pentagon's futurist sees bad guys in 'the gap,' and good guys belonging to 'the core.'"
That I could live with a bit easier.
One thing you have to understand with any profile, or really with any TV appearance: not only are you only as good as your interviewer (and CSPAN's Brian Lamb was the best), but you really are at the mercy of however they want to angle your book or you. So, when I get profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Greg Jaffe really wants to run with the "odd couple" theme between Art Cebrowski (my old boss in the Pentagon) and me. Because Art's so famously military and Catholic, I get to be the atheist Marxist. Now, I'm Catholic too. In fact, that's a fairly strong bond between Art and I, and I told Greg I liked "The Passion of the Christ" just like Art, but because he represented convention and I was cast as ultra-unorthodox, I got painted into a corner a bit, and the story, for example, goes out of its way to ignore the fact I have a PhD in political science from Harvard, which doesn't exactly make me counterculture in most people's minds.
So I interview with Matt Kelley of AP and he's really intrigued by my "openly" quoting Star Trek ("Not that there's anything wrong with that . . .."), so he decides his version of Barnett-the-unconventional-visionary story is going to focus on that.
So you learn to live with it and every once in a while you push yourself to say no if the fit just seems bad. They say you should never turn down sex with a beautiful partner or ever refuse to go on TV, but frankly, that sounds like a recipe for doing public-service announcements from your death bed.
So yes, I do turn down TV offers regularly. Today I turned one down from Fox News and John Gibson's "The Big Story" show. A producer asked if I could talk about yesterday's U.S. military raid into an Iraqi village near the Syrian border, which has generated wildly conflicting stories about what was actually involved, but clearly involved some civilians being killed. I said no, because I really didn't have any specific expertise to offer on that and it couldn't be logically tied to any material in my book.
Maybe I'll get another offer from them in the future, or maybe I blew it for a stretch by saying no (or worse, writing about it here!), but you have to learn with that kind of stuff. Getting on for any reason is a bad tactic, whereas sticking to what you're best at is the stuff of Peter Drucker.
That's why for now I'm turning down offers to have my blog cross-posted on other sites. Such offers are quite flattering, no doubt, but as soon as I start self-editing for wider audiences than those that simply choose to come here and read, then I think I start killing the blog's persona, which—frankly—is just starting to emerge in the same manner as it did when I unwittingly engaged in my first blogging effort back in '94—namely, the lengthy emails I sent each week to family and friends around the world concerning our firstborn's cancer (or what later became the site/unpublished manuscript called "The Emily Updates: A Year in the Life of a Three-Year-Old Battling Cancer"). I wrote that strictly for myself, my wife Vonne, and for a future adult Emily to enjoy. Everyone else, as far as I was concerned, was simply eavesdropping. Enjoy at will, criticize with some care, but opt out if you're not interested.
That's how I feel about this blog: I keep it the way I want it and those who enjoy do so knowing it's as real as I can make it, and in no way packaged with overlapping or competing audiences in mind. I mean, I get enough of that in my day job . . ..
How do I know I'm succeeding in this effort? The emails I receive tell me everything I need to know, even the ones with the spewing obscenities (why do these people always spell so bad?).
But here’s bright bit of feedback from the system: this site is listed as the “Feed of the Day” on Feedster.com. I got this email from Betsy Devine at Feedster who makes the call:
Hi Tom --My webmaster and I take this citation as a real compliment from the community. This weblog is a real experiment for me in terms of my day-job. No doubt about it: I could never run this effort off my now moribund War College site—just can’t be done given all the usual governmental restrictions. But beyond that day-job, my desire for greater connectivity and wider conversation in my work is great. That’s what drove me to write the book, and it’s what drives me (and frankly my webmaster) to make this off-hours-yet-significant effort out-of-pocket.
Just a note to say that your blog is today's Feedster Feed of the Day. ("Feed of the Day" is a service we do for Feedster users, pointing them toward a new or timely or under-appreciated or just plain unexpected RSS feed.)
Our goal is to showcase sites of unusual interest, not to endorse any political viewpoint. Previous Feed of the Day winners include quite a few shades of left- and right-wing opinion. I restrained myself from quoting the "sucking eggs " image in my citation, since you don't like it, but I thought it was great . . ..
Betsy Devine
*************
Date: May 20, 2004
Feed: "Thomas P. M. Barnett : : Weblog" ( http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/index.rdf for http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/ )
Citation: Book-in-the-news The Pentagon's New Map featured in multi-dimensional smartperson blog by its author war-college prof Thomas P. M. Barnett. Hard to say what give more pleasure--his non-toxic, optimistic global vision or his first-person blogging of media frenzy to die for.
So encouragement like that from Feedster does matter—it matters a whole hell of a lot. Critt and I aren’t in this for the money (although we’re willing to learn . . .), but for the sheer joy of connectivity. Passing grades aren’t passing thoughts for us—they’re manna from heaven.
Today’s catch:
REFERENCES:
“Sikh Who Saved India’s Economy Is Named Premier: A task of continuing reforms, but with more Indians benefiting,” by Amy Waldman, New York Times, 20 May, p. A3.
“It Is Settled: Singh to Be India’s Prime Minister: Economist Vows to Extend Market-Opening Policies, Buttressed by Aid for Poor,” by Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 20 May, p. A3.
“White House Considers Plan to Let Iraqi Forces Opt Out of Military Operations Ordered by the U.S.: Hoping to confer legitimacy on a caretaker government,” by Steven R. Weisman, NYT, 20 May, p. A13.
