Public-Diplomacy Blast from the Past -- on the sad occasion of the tragic death of an American missionary

Image from, with caption:  A photo Mr. Chau posted on Instagram on Oct. 21, five days after landing on Port Blair for the last time.

Article by your Public Diplomacy Review compiler in the Huffington Post (2011); "Public Diplomacy: The World Should Be Teaching Us, Mr. Kristof"; now with mixed feelings reposted on this blog -- given the tragic death of an evidently idealistic young man, the missionary John Allen Chau, killed on a remote Indian Ocean island, where he traveled with a waterproof Bible -- but my piece, doubtless off mark to some, may be indirectly pertinent to well meaning and idealistic Peace Corps volunteers, if not aspiring Foreign Service officers in the Public Diplomacy "cone"; my message: you can try to talk with, but not necessarily convert, the non-American world, even if armed with a waterproof Bible/State Department "talking points" "proving/arguing" the unquestionable morality/truth of American "values"/policy; see also (1) (2 [a dated The New Yorker piece on the Peace Corps] (3)

Here's my not-very-nice Huffington Post article:

[Citing] well-meaning Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times:

“Peace Corps and Teach for America represent the best ethic of public service. But at a time when those programs can’t meet the demand from young people seeking to give back, we need a new initiative: Teach for the World.  

In my mind, Teach for the World would be a one-year program placing young Americans in schools in developing countries. The Americans might teach English or computer skills, or coach basketball or debate teams. ... 

 This would be a government-financed effort to supplement an American public diplomacy [JB emphasis] outreach that has been eviscerated over the last few decades.”

Mr. Kristof, who wants young Americans to teach English the world over, seems unaware that all too many of us here in the homeland (which is how we now identify our cry-the-beloved country in these sad post-9/11 times) are incapable of writing a coherent English sentence free of grammatical and spelling errors. And how many of us called-to-duty language missionaries currently living in said homeland, if volunteering to coach “debate teams” overseas, could actually be capable of crafting a logical argument, given our 24/7 we-can’t-stop-loving-it culture of instant mindless gratification a la Tee-Vee & Twitter & uptalk?

“I mean, like you know, whatever” — such is, increasingly, our American contribution to serious world-wide discourse.

Well, OK, post-modern language/argument, without oh-so-boring grammar or logic, is maybe what we in the New World have to offer to our globalized planet. No problem. (Actually, I’m all for this Americanization, until I read, as I often do, a paper “written” by a computer-savvy US undergraduate that makes absolutely no, I mean absolutely no, sense, not even, dare I say, from a “post-modernist” perspective).

In my Foreign Service career, I found many distinguished foreigners who spoke English better than I did (and pray tell, Mr. Kristof, what is a “developing country”? Detroit, Michigan?). These distinguished foreigners had actually read, very carefully, English-language classics and knew the fundamentals of classical rhetoric, hence their ability to engage in serious debate. I thought they should be teaching me.

As for the Peace Corps, its main drawbacks are twofold.

(A) Giving jobs to too many well meaning but desperately-seeking-to-be-employed, résumé-driven, undereducated provincial American BA’s with, all too often, little or no knowledge of foreign languages/cultures or substantial skills, personal or intellectual, even in teaching (or speaking) their own native language.

There are, of course, notable exceptions, including “senior citizens” in the program; but much of the Peace Corps is, I would suggest, an updated, “democratic” version of a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes [JB note -- link not in the original article].

In all fairness, these well meaning [JB - hyphen deleted from original article], often naive, Peace Corps volunteers (I had the privilege of meeting many of them in my Foreign Service career), may be eager to learn about the outside world. But if they are parachuted to teach/“set an example” in other countries, they should know far more about them (and their own country and language) than Peace Corps “training” provides (and by the time they know something about where they are, they are shipped out).

(B) As suggested by the above remarks, most sadly and importantly, the Peace Corps is not a bilateral program. In essence, “we” (the U.S.) are telling “them” (the “foreigners”) what to do (in a gentle way) — a twentieth-century Cold War one-way-communications propaganda model, granted on a perhaps laudable human level.

But today (I won’t say at a time of US “decline”) we “altruistic” American taxpayers could certainly use highly-skilled volunteers from other countries, including math teachers from “developing countries,” for our poorly performing public secondary schools, in exchange for our own volunteers, who would be far more skilled than many in our well-meaning Peace Corps currently are. In this way we would be honestly serving our own interests, while at the same time asking for the world’s cooperation, when and where we need it.

The world should teaching us, Mr. Kristof, in more ways than one. Not just the U.S. teaching the world. Time for a real deal.