Dateline: Faculty Club, U Cal Berkeley, Berkeley CA, 9 March 2005
Guess I was smart not to mention the exact academic who's material I found so stupid!
But this journalist screws up: they weren't allowed into my talk for some reason, and he must have heard all the buzz about it, so he wanted to pen something, but then he went off the bio in the program, which said I was still at the college, when I opened my talk by explicitly noting I had left. Shame, shame on that one.
Here's the excerpt from this post:
Embassy, March 9th, 2005
EDITORIAL
Soldier Talk
There is something refreshing about the talk of soldiers -- even generals . . .
If we hadn't already learned that lesson from Lt. Gen Roméo Dallaire, there was ample opportunity to get up to speed at a conference in the Chateau Laurier last week.
Military frankness was front and centre at the 68th Annual General Meeting of the Conference of Defence Associations and the 21st Annual Seminar of the CDA Institute. What that mouthful of a title identified was a get-together of military men and women (mostly men) around a number of intriguing, timely topics and several first-rate speakers . . .
[Tom: here he covers my appearance on the day's last panel, where I joined the speakers for Q&A.]
Following a talk by the third panelist, the Royal Military College's Dean of Arts, Dr. J. Sokolsky, the audience was treated to one of the stars of the conference, Dr. Thomas Barnett. Dr. Barnett is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. His book, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, is said to have become deeply influential with forward-thinking members of the military.
Dr. Barnett told the audience that Canada had made the right decision not to participate in the costly and ineffective ballistic missile defence program. Later on after the conference he bluntly noted in his weblog that one of the speakers so infuriated him that he considered walking out on the panel, but changed his mind because " this guy's stupidity was so compelling, like a car wreck, that I simply couldn't."
[Here he gets it wrong. It wasn't any of the panel speakers whom I found lacking, but the guy who followed the panel and summed up the day's events. I actually didn't hear any of the panelists, as I walked into the room just as the last of them was wrapping up. Here is what I actually wrote in the blog: tell me how this guy screws up my meaning:
Getting back to the hotel, I run the goodies upstairs, grab my Mac and head back into the conference, because the conference head asked me to appear on the last panel (once their trio of presentations was done) for the Q&A portion. At first, I got no questions, but then fielded the last two.
After suffering through the concluding comments of this seriously dumbass Canadian academic, who presented an idiotic analysis of U.S. national security since 9/11 (I came awfully close to letting my sotto voce "bullshits" get loud enough for some in the room to hear). I thought of walking out in an obvious fashion, but this guy's stupidity was so compelling, like a car wreck, that I simply couldn't. It was stunning, how much this jerk breathlessly misrepresented politics and security affairs in DC. Me, I was (I confess) sticking around for the liquor at the cocktail hour.
Ah well, we downgrade this journalist for his sloppiness. Dude could have at least approached me.
Back to the rest of the text, where he continues to quote my blog.]
In the end he admitted he really liked Canadians -- especially drinking beer with them. "Canadians are like cool Americans," he said "and I mean every colour and creed."
By the time the panel abruptly ended, many of the civilian guests were thinking that a little more soldier talk might just be a good thing. And the next time it would be helpful to have the third D, for Diplomacy, better represented. The idea of getting Canadian soldiers, diplomats and development workers together in frank discussions seems ripe with promise. It should happen more often.
--Jim Creskey
Lesson: you never know who's reading the blog.
And no, I won't provide the name of the Canadian academic whose presentation struck me as so stupid.
For the full text of the online article, click here
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