Global Thoughts — 10 September 2013

IMG_5233We just finished our summer holiday which involved two cities and two resorts: Chicago and DC, the Homestead in Virginia and the Mohonk Lodge in upstate NY. We are at the age where our kids want to be with us, but there are limits. Elizabeth is close to 8 and she enjoys the kids day camp at the resorts. “I’ve had enough family time now; I want to go back to camp.” She ate some adult food, not just the kiddie menu. She came out for a night of dinner and dancing with the adults, and she did good at horseback riding and archery. Jeremy loved the paddleboats and the new duck tour of Washington DC. He just loves quacking that whistle they gave him and he enjoyed the lazy river at the Homestead. Travel in DC is a challenge with kids of this age but we managed. Being able to walk from one free Smithsonian museum to another is a real help. Some travel notes follow at the bottom of this posting.

In the department of everyone learns through experience — Jeremy was eating s’mores at a campfire and disregarded our warnings that they would make him sick. He ate 4 or 5 of them — graham cracker sandwiches with roasted marshmallows and melted chocolate inside. Sure enough at 2am my wife awoke to him throwing up 3x and we were quite happy that housekeeping showed right up. They keep someone around all night just waiting for such things to happen. Our daughter slept through all the commotion, and Jeremy promised that from now on he might settle for just 2 s’mores at future campfires.

Here is a little story. The last night of our summer trip we were sitting out at about 11pm and an old lady walks by and urges us to come look at a flower with her. This flower buds once a year around this time and after a moth flies around and pollinates it, the bud blossoms for one night in all its glory and fragrance — then POOF it’s gone in the morning. I’d call it the Prom Flower — all that expectation and energy stored up all year long just for that one evening. Seems kinda sad.

When you look at the packaging of toys for little kids, they tell you what fun it is and what kinds of things you can do with the toy. But kids can’t read. What parents really want to read is “This toy will keep your kids busy for hours and it is easy enough for them to do it without asking you for help.”

If I were going to buy real estate in a major city at a reasonable price, I’d look at Chicago. If the weather weren’t so cold there 8 months out of the year, it’d be 3x the price. You can get a 3 bedroom apartment overlooking Lake Michigan a few miles from downtown for under half a million dollars.

Now that everyone and their dog has an i-Phone or something equivalent, just try and find one of those SD memory chips that goes inside a digital camera.  The good news is that you can get a 16 gigabyte chip that will let you take an hour’s worth of video or God knows how many photos (at least 5,000) for about $30.

Do you feel that you get too many surveys asking about what you thought of a hotel, car rental, airline trip, telephone conversation, website visit — you get the idea…. And then most of these surveys don’t really give you an opportunity to make a real comment — just fill in a number as if that would tell them what they needed to know.

I find it distressing to see people in elevators and on street corners just staring at their hand-held telephones. On my summer vacation I sat in a whirlpool in a spa and saw a husband and wife sitting together in the pool just staring at their respective Kindles. Every time I go to a spa nowadays, somebody is always sitting typing into a laptop. They should outlaw these in spas. It makes me nervous to see someone else working when they are supposed to be relaxing.  I still have one of those old-fashioned clam phones that does nothing except make phone calls (it does some other things such as take pictures and send text messages but I don’t really know how or care to use those features). Of course my 5 year old kid knows how to make music come out of my wife’s i-Phone which is very distressing to us because we don’t know how to turn it off! I keep my phone switched off as much as possible. During my 2 week vacation I didn’t check my email once, except when someone called me specifically to tell me that I needed to look at a particular piece of email. And I was very happy to be without it — I find you get much more time to think and a lot less stress without all these interruptions.

Does it not surprise you that multi-national companies are finding it very hard to get people to live as expats in Japan?

The US Federal Reserve is really a government unto itself, and it has a lot of power that affects other countries’ economies, such as China and India. A good number of problems in those countries have been aggravated due to the recent actions of the Fed. India’s currency has taken a dive in the past few months and China’s banks are seizing up. That’s not to say that these countries aren’t responsible for their own failures, but the Fed’s actions have helped push some bad situations over the edge.

The US defense department and its intelligence services have invested a lot into technologies that have helped build the internet industry. People don’t realize how much of this industry was funded by US government investment. It’s not true that government R&D doesn’t make a difference.

The Economist wrote that public schools are center stage for the civil rights theater nowadays. Black kids do better in private schools than public schools, and today’s public schools are being run more for the pleasure of unionized teachers than students. Blacks want vouchers because in today’s public school, a kid who wants to read a book is considered too “white.”

I went to a show last month called Soul Doctor about the life of Shlomo Carlebach, who was a Jewish rabbi and entertainer who died almost 20 years ago. While people tend to remember theologians and what they wrote or said, Carlebach will likely be remembered as the most influential person of the century in Judaism for his music, because when you go to a synagogue the odds are that the tune you are singing the liturgy to was probably composed by him. Jewish people today have no idea how many of the songs they sing are those that he composed. He had a complicated life, but his songs are simple and catchy.

I never realized how much a part of daily life “You Tube” would become. This week the New York Times editorial on candidates running for mayor of NY City recommended various videos on You Tube showing statements by those candidates that people could watch if they wanted to get a better sense of the candidate. This week in synagogue the rabbi cited a You Tube video that he recommended people watch. Earlier this week the cantor of my synagogue sent out a list of recommended You Tube videos showing cantorial performances of High Holiday liturgy. These are not what I expected when I first heard about You Tube several years ago.

I think that Obama is being unfairly characterized as a “weak” president in terms of how he is dealing with Syria. The truth is that he is trying to avoid being sucked into a no-win situation. Most Americans really don’t care how many Arabs kill each other and how they do it. They are not moved by the fact that there are 2 million refugees moving into countries neighboring Syria and over 100,000 people dead. Perhaps it was a mistake to draw a red line around the use of chemical weapons because nobody really cares enough to go out and use US troops to support it. So now you have this feeling that the US has to act in order to save Obama’s face and nobody really thinks it makes sense to go through the expense and trouble of trying to weaken Assad without having the goal of removing him. And nobody really wants to remove Assad because there are no good alternatives to him that anyone wants to support. Put all the talk about punishing treaty violators to the side — no American wants to put their life or money on the line to punish Syria for using chemical weapons against other Syrians.

It would not surprise me if Russia were to offer Syria a face-saving way out of this crisis to avert American air strikes and let Obama climb down from his tree.

A real problem is that the US presidency is so weak that Congress pulls too many of the strings. It is virtually impossible for a president to negotiate a treaty these days because there is no chance that Congress will ever ratify it. Unless Obama can be sure the Congress will support him on whatever he wants to do, he is a fool to make any kind of declaration about anything — but then, what is the use of the president saying anything when you know that we have a Congress that can’t agree on anything? It is a recipe for disaster and it is why the Putins and Khameinis of the world have the upper hand. I personally don’t recommend the US presidency to anyone. Unless you are willing to take charge and defy Congress and risk impeachment, there is no reason for anyone to deal seriously with you as a decisionmaker.

I am supposed to go with my family to Israel in 2 weeks for the Sukkot holiday and to stay at a kibbutz in the Galilee about 10 miles from the Lebanon and Syrian borders. I was hoping this would have blown over by the time I got there but now with Obama going to Congress it looks like it will drag on for awhile. My feeling is that Syria, the Iranians and Russians will be clever enough to absorb whatever Obama reluctantly dishes out to them with his military card and to let it pass.  Striking Israel is only liable to make things worse for them because at this point the Israelis are not interested in getting involved in the Syrian theater. They are not looking to remove Assad from power and they don’t care what goes on inside Syria as long as it remains in Syria; of course they are on the watch for whatever might go on outside Syria to the extent it will affect them. I don’t agree that the Iranians are chuckling in the background and that they think they can get away with nuclear weapons deployment due to Obama’s failure to act in Syria. They are different ballgames and I look at Obama’s reticence with Syria as evidence that he is holding tight viz a viz Iran. Obama will get Congressional support for the strike because he held off and asked for it; the Israelis are happy to see Obama twist on this and look as if he is weak so that he will be more likely to act in the Iranian theater later on.

One seasoned policy hand I spoke to in DC this month who dealt with Israel at a top level until earlier this past year said that Bibi’s new ambassador to the US Ron Dermer is a good professional that you can effectively communicate with, even if you vehemently disagree with him. I take that as an important vote of confidence.

Another interesting tidbit I heard was that whether or not Vice President Biden is going to run for President in 2014, it is to his advantage to look as if he is going to run since he is being treated poorly by Obama’s staff. If they know that they might have to work for him someday, they might treat him better. Another DC professional disagreed; she said that Biden doesn’t have a chance in hell of winning and that nobody thinks they have to be afraid of him, and that it is just part of the natural order that the VP and President’s staffs don’t get along.

DC  B-Team: One other problem for Obama and his team is that more than ever you have a lot of policy being run by relatively young and inexperienced people because Congress has made it impossible to recruit seasoned professionals because the confirmation process has become so dirty and disgusting. 25 year old kids are poring over people’s financial records trying to dig up dirt, they don’t understand what they are looking at because they haven’t done anything themselves in real life, and then they are just making dirt of out anyone who had a successful life because everyone is viewed through the prism of who they are aligned with — are you Hillary Clinton’s person, Joe Biden’s person, Larry Summer’s person, etc. You can see this especially with regard to foreign policy; Mr. Kerry has hardly been home at State and most of the top jobs are still unstaffed. If I were Kerry, I wouldn’t waste time worrying about filling the post of something like Undersecretaryfor African Affairs and worrying about some Republican senator trying to veto the nomination because he wants an anti-gay rights bill passed when I could try to fly around the Middle East trying to broker a peace process.

Egypt is another theater which has no good options for Obama. At the executive level, the main concern being told to me is that Egypt offers a lot of privileges to the Americans for overflights and use of the Suez Canal. The Americans don’t care about what goes on inside Egypt as long as the military gives it what it wants and it is not going to jeopardize its ties to the military over the consequences being meted out to Mr. Morsi, a guy who had no friends in the West and few in his own country. Right now the military has a blank check by the Saudis and the Emirates to shut down the Moslem Brotherhood, and Qatar has grown much quieter under the new emir, as was predicted in last month’s Global Thoughts.

Here is a quote from American author George Weigel, cited to in a High Holiday speech this past weekend at the Spanish & Portuguese synagogue in New York by Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik. His purpose in quoting it was to prove an unrelated point, but I think it is appropriate when looking at the events in Egypt and the overall Arab Spring:

Anyone can bang away on a piano; but that is to make noise, not music, and it’s a barbaric, not humanistic, expression of freedom. At first, learning to play the piano is a matter of some drudgery as we master exercises that seem like a constraint, a burden. But as our mastery grows, we discover a new richer dimension of freedom; we can play the music we like, we can even create new music on our own. Freedom, in other words, is a matter of gradually acquiring the capacity to choose the good and to do what we choose with perfection. Law is thus intertwined with freedom…good law facilitates our achievement of the human goods that we instinctively seek because of who we are and what we are meant to be as human beings.

My takeaway from this is that elections themselves without institutions in place and the social constructs to back them up are like banging away on the piano. And the idea of democracy is not just breaking free of something, such as Mubarak and then having a Moslem Brotherhood with a quarter of the vote carry on as an incumbent as if nobody else existed. It’s striving toward something and trying to achieve a potential. You need institutions, laws, social contracts involving people willing to live with those election results and to work with factions, and a program that states a goal for a country and invites everyone to work toward achieving its potential. Then you can make music. That’s where the Arab Spring has to go if elections are to rise above the noise. So far we haven’t seen it happen, not in Libya, Egypt or Yemen. Maybe in Tunisia, but that country has the most institutions in place that the others lack.

IMG_4919 chicago10001Here are some travel notes about our summer holiday. Chicago: Trump Hotel is a well run hotel with killer views over the river and a great central location. Has a great gym and nice spa. Highlight of our visit wasn’t the air show (it was a flop since the good acts cancelled out this year) but the kids loved romping around the fountains in their swim suits in Millennium Park; the Museum of Science and Industry is the best one we’ve seen in the US and the live show about how poop is made was very moving (and was excellent); Kingston Mines is a blues club you can take kids to early on Sunday evenings; out on the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) you can go out on an indoor ledge and look straight down thru the glass; and the Sea Dog is a fast boat ride on the lake leaving from Navy Pier which also has amusement rides for kids.

IMG_5075 IMG_4970 Homestead Resort in southwest Virginia: We’ve been there during the winter this year and wanted to return in summer. We enjoy dinner and dancing nightly in the main dining room. They built a large outdoor pool with a lazy river (float around in a water with current in a tube) and two big water slides; a very nice minigolf course; they have various activities such as horseback riding, archery, hay rides, and a new spa. You can go on a 3 hour nature hike with a very interesting guide named Brian who has become a real brand in and of himself. We were expecting a lot from the day camp but found that it overpromised. From the Homestead it is a 4 hour drive to DC. We were going to take Amtrak (the railroad) but the trip is 6 hours long and the trains which run once a day several times a weak were consistently running 8 hours late so we decided to rent a car and drive instead. We like this place; the staff is very nice and they really care if you have fun. The vibe is good; the Greenbrier is 17 miles a way and there you get the kids in the Lilly Pullitzer dressses. This place is WASPY too but more down to earth.

IMG_5126 IMG_5180Washington DC is a challenge with kids 6 and 7 years old. In DC there are some new attractions. The Duck Tour of DC takes you over land and water and you can sit on the Potomac River and watch the planes land overhead at the airport. The Indian Museum next door to the Air and Space Museum has the best lunch in the city out of the various museums; Washington talks about healthy eating and the Air & Space Museum is all McDonalds and fast food. The American History museum is half finished with the renovations and we spent an hour there. Our kids are not quite excited about museums; the Air and Space Museum is dated with lots of words on walls and they pretty much blew past it; the museum needs a real do-over. The aquarium at the Natural History museum which seemed so large to us 5 years ago with little tots seems a lot smaller now. But the good thing about the Smithsonian is that it is free and you can hop around from one museum to another with the kids and that worked well for us. The Old Post Office is dead now with the stores closing and it becoming a Trump Hotel at year end; I guess people will take pictures with cutouts of Trump instead of Obama now. Arlington Cemetery is probably not the place to go with kids.

Karen and I tried to introduce the kids to civics concepts, such as the idea that in North Korea we would have probably been killed or sent to labor camps because our little Jeremy wouldn’t stand up for the changing of the guard ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We visited the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials and tried to describe concepts such as freedom and democracy. The kids exercised their freedom to sit on a bench right inside the memorial and eat their popsicles. It was the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s march on DC; we were on the carousel in the Washington Mall (the carousel got the kids all excited) and it just so happened that on that same day 50 years ago the first African American kid got to ride the carousel at a park in Baltimore. They brought it to DC to commemorate the event and our kids were on the carousel on that 50th anniversary. I tried to explain to our kids that black kids couldn’t ride on a carousel and they didn’t seem to care. Then we explained to them that 75 years ago Jewish kids couldn’t ride on carousels in certain countries and probably lots of places in the US as well, and they seemed a bit more receptive.

IMG_5047A really good restaurant in DC is the hotel Tabard Inn. DC Coast and Range were OK but not as good. The entrances to lots of Metro stations are hidden; they took away the signs that say Metro. I assume they are afraid the terrorists will find them?  The Hay Adams hotel is right across from the White House and the hotel is a nice boutique hotel that offers good personalized service to top tier guests. Our babysitter could tell us about the various celebrities at the hotel that she had babysat for; our kids probably were not as well behaved as the British Ambassador’s kids. There is a terrace where you can get a view of the White House from high up. The gym is weak and they charge you $10 for PBS Kids or Disney on the TV, even though they have 100 other channels for free on the TV. They know they can blackmail the parents for these 2 channels. The rooms have hardly any drawers in them — even the presidential suite had no drawers. I know because I went inside and looked. Breakfast there is excellent; it is worthwhile to go there for breakfast even if you are not staying in the hotel. The french toast and the oatmeal souffle are outstanding.

 

 

IMG_5234An hour’s flight to Albany, NY and then a 90 minute drive to The Mohonk Lodge which is 2 hours drive from NY City. We have been to the Mohonk several times and the challenge now is to keep the place relevant as our kids grow. It succeeds very well even though the carriage rides are now to babyish for the kids and we won’t be doing baby races in the parlor. The best hiking path to the Skytop Tower (which we finally had a chance to hike to without the kids in tow) is to go up the Skypath to the Reservoir Path and pick up Skytop Road. Just something to know. 6 year old kids can go horseback riding here; at the Homestead they need to be about 8 years old. There is a nice spa and gym here. They have a beach and the indoor pool is kept warm. At the daytime BBQ you can have vege burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches made on a separate vegetarian part of the grill. They have a children’s garden with lots of things to touch, taste and smell. The kids went to tennis clinic; the entertainment was good even though sometimes it seems the church lady is in charge;  Here you can do your own laundry; the Homestead could use that too. The kids camp is drop off and free; you can come and go as you like. They have activities for kids thru age 17 and split them up into various groups so that it is very relevant to the kids at their age level. Our kids made friends at the resort and several playdates will probably follow back in NY. Elizabeth kept asking Karen for her business card so that she could hand them out to potential playdates for followup in NY; she is a great little networker! We tended to find that people we ran into had their kids in accelerated programs in the public schools of NY. I think that people who travel with their kids are more curious and want to see their kids succeed. Except that these programs are so accelerated that by 5th grade the kids are two years ahead. It is a helluva lot of pressure people put on these kids. We don’t push ours — we want them to do well but we are not grooming them for Harvard or even Yale.

Share:

Share This Post

Most Recent Posts

Archives
Get The Latest Updates

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

No spam, notifications only about new posts.

Read More

Related Posts

Global Thoughts — 20 December 2023

Karen and I shared a salad for our 20th anniversary lunch out. 20 years ago it would have been lots of food and desert. In 30 years will we be sharing our dentures for lunch? I would like to dare

Act II for the Jewish State — 19 December 2023

After 75 years, Israel as an enterprise is not succeeding as it should. Jews should cut their losses in the Middle East and reboot the Jewish State elsewhere, focusing on building excellence instead of simply trying to survive. Thomas Friedman’s

Scroll to Top