Avuncular American

R.I.P. Algeria's Idir: Two Shores, One Dream

Woke up to the news this morning that Algeria's famous Kabyle folk singer Idir had passed away.  Allah yirhamu.  Below is a post I wrote while still under the spell of his concert in Lyon in July 2008.  And for those who don't know the music of Idir, here's his trademark song A Vava Inouva, sung in tandem with Scottish vocalist Karen Matheson, whose haunting voice is the centerpiece of the Celtic folk group Capercaillie.  This beautifully illustrated video by Ismail Abdelfattah has the added advantage of providing the transcription of the original Kabyle Berber along with a French translation.

 

July 2008:  I’m still catching up after weeks in the mountains and on the road, so I’m only now writing about a concert we attended in Lyon on July 6, on our way back from Italy.  Our son treated us to tickets to “Nuit de l’Algérie,” a double bill concert at the city’s open air Roman theater.  And what a treat it was: legendary (it’s overused, but a term that suits) Kabyle (Berber) musician Idir (check out his website - he looks like an Avuncular Algerian), followed by the 40-member chaabi orchestra El Gusto.

The world has just finished paying brief attention to the Mediterranean and its peoples thanks to President Sarkozy’s weekend summit meeting in Paris, but the multicultural crowd in Lyon a week earlier personified a Mediterranean unified with a passion that politicians can only dream of.  On stage and in the audience, Muslim, Jew, Christian, whether Algerian, French, or a stray American – the atmosphere was joyous (El Gusto = “joy,” reflecting the Spanish/Sephardic element in Algeria’s melting pot).

Idir set the stage, and his following is intensely loyal.  Several showed up wrapped in Kabyle and Algerian flags, and it didn’t take long until they were dancing (mostly solo, in the demure folk style of North Africa that has vulgar belly dancing beat by a mile) in the Roman stone aisles.  Idir, who has been a Kabyle Algerian institution for more than thirty years, is a voice for moderation, for inter-religious fraternity, and respect for women.  Indeed, it appeared to us that of the largely Maghrebi-origin audience, women accounted for a hefty majority of Idir’s fans - though very few head scarves were in evidence.

Following the rousing folk-rock-fusion Idir group intro, it was a little odd to shift to the suited and decidedly graying “El Gusto,” which some European writers have nicknamed “the Algerian Buena Vista Social Club.”  Last year Robin Denselow of The Guardian attended an El Gusto concert in Marseille:

Behind the rabbi and the imam was a 42-piece orchestra, composed of Algerian Muslim and Jewish musicians. Some of them had lived together in the country before 1962 - the year of Algerian independence - when some 130,000 Algerian Jews, the vast majority of the community, fled for France, fearing for their future in what was now a Muslim state. It was the end of an era in which Muslim, Jewish, and European musicians had lived and played together in the narrow streets of the Casbah in Algiers, developing a rousing, wildly varied hybrid style - chaabi [literally, "popular"] - that the El Gusto project set out to rediscover.

No rabbi or imam on stage in Lyon, but otherwise an excellent resume of the band’s origins.  Just how "popular" is chaabi?  The concert flyer and website has a picture of three of the musicians practicing in what looks like an Algiers barber shop.

As in “Buena Vista” the Ry Cooder of El Gusto, responsible for bringing these respectable gents together, is a young Irish-Algerian film-maker, Safinez Bousbia.  According to Denselow, Bousbia

was determined to track down surviving musicians from the heyday of chaabi, the 1940s and 50s. Chaabi is a mix of Arabic and north African berber styles, blended with modern French chanson, American boogie and Latin American styles, brought by the American troops stationed in Algeria during the second world war. It's a lively, versatile music suitable for weddings, bars and concert halls alike, and played exclusively by men.

American boogie... that explains the banjos.  I can testify to the influence of American GIs, who landed in Vichy-held Algeria in November 1942: our plumber in Oran, an impressionable boy at the time, years later still remembered chewing bubble gum and repeating '40s pickup lines like “What’s cookin’ chicken?” for the soldiers’ amusement.  For francophone readers, it’s worth watching the video excerpt of Bousbia explaining her first contacts with the elderly musicians, whom she feared tiring out with the first hour and a half long session.  Not to worry: the music went on for close to four hours!  For anglophones, Quidam Productions has a wonderful series of clips from Bousbia's documentary film "El Gusto: The Good Mood."

Actually, we pooped out before the end of the Lyon concert, since the next day was a working day for our son and his girlfriend.  As we climbed down and left the amphitheater, the music followed us as we walked towards the car.  That night in Lyon was a gift, for us of course, but mainly for the young “beur” (French slang for the sons and daughters of Algerian, and also Moroccan and Tunisian, immigrants) fans celebrating these ambassadors of normality from the oft troubled country of their parents or grandparents.  I suspect that the audience, like some of the chaabi old timers, included a certain number of pieds noirs and their descendants, from the community of Europeans who left Algeria in 1962.  Algeria has a way of going to your head, and staying there, as Alistair Horne noted in his everlasting work on the Algerian war of independence, A Savage War of Peace - "l’Algérie, ça monte à la tête."

“Deux Rives, Un Rêve” (Two Shores, One Dream) is the title of Idir’s album that we picked up before the concert.  That’s exactly what was happening last week in Lyon.

Culture: The Singing Diplomat

To be precise, it was actually the diplomat's wife who sang.

We were listening to Edith Piaf's unique voice - are any contemporary singers capable of even a tenth of her emotion-in-song? - when my wife remembered that we once attended a concert in Alexandria, Egypt, where the wife of the French Cultural Center director belted out "Je ne regrette rien" and some of Piaf's other hits.

That couple - though he didn't sing, he certainly knew talent - was a good example of what American cultural diplomat (retired) Patricia Kushlis (Whirled View) meant when she recently wrote about the practice of public diplomacy:

Academia doesn’t and can’t teach hands-on public diplomacy. It can teach about public diplomacy, its history and why it’s important for nurturing and sustaining America’s image abroad, and it can teach some of the skills needed, but not how to do it in practice. That comes from on-the-job experience and training.

There may be another aspect that Kushlis doesn't treat in her excellent post, but which is a standby in debate in public diplomacy circles: the lack of a cabinet level (or at least interagency) home for culture or cultural diplomacy.

What? Howls of protest from the State Department's ECA, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  Don't get me wrong: thank God for ECA, which during the dark years of Iraq, WMD, GWOT, and "with us or against us" had to soldier on, battling in an internal culture war within an administration that weaponized everything, including ideas.

My point is not to criticize US efforts in cultural diplomacy, but to say that other countries see it as more central to their international presence.  Take France, again.  After our dynamic singing cultural duo in "Alex" in the eighties, along comes to Alexandria Olivier Poivre d'Arvror, a man of letters from a family of cultural icons (for more than twenty years his brother Patrick - "PPDA" - was a household name, the Dan Rather of French TV).

Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, who recently published an erudite and beautiful book "Alexandrie Bazar: le roman d'une ville" (image above)  on the city that came to captivate him (it does, I can attest), also heads CulturesFrance, an organization of the French MFA and its Ministry of Culture and Communication.  I know, the US does not have either of the latter, considering perhaps that communication is best handled by spokespeople ("we got 'em in every agency"), and that culture isn't something that you can identify, let alone bureaucratize.

CulturesFrance, whose Euros 35 million budget could fit into a subchapter of the State Department's, may get more bang for its buck, if, as I suspect, France could beat the US in a word association competition with the word "culture."  Think Alliance Française, think Institut Français, etc.  It also doesn't hurt that their Minister of Culture, despite a bothersome fracas a few months ago about his extracurricular proclivities, is another cultural household name.

The US long ago gave up many - but not all (Alex lives!) - of its cultural centers, preferring in some administrations to pursue "placement" (get those press releases on US policy toward Cuba in all the local papers) or in others to wage "the battle of ideas."  A little too much war, maybe not enough love.

I only dabbled in public diplomacy in my years in the Foreign Service, perhaps an illustration of what Pat Kushlis sees as "public diplomacy in the State Department has been too often treated as a “throw away."  If they let me be an acting Public Affairs Officer...  Actually, I took the job pretty seriously, and had lots of fun while I was at it.  Which goes back to her point: public diplomacy and cultural diplomats are made in the doing, not the preaching.

Short of hiring writers, composers, or artists for the US PD function, maybe the most that can be done in the US way of diplomacy is appointing a few cultural people as political ambassadors.  Instead of only rewarding the bundlers who bring in the big bucks, maybe send Oprah as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and shake things up a bit.  Or how about Angelina Jolie to Burma - she's already a UN Goodwill Ambassador.

I vote for the Dixie Chicks as special Middle East Peace envoys.  They have a certain amount of cred.

(Final) Departures

Okuribito - "Departures" in international release - won the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.  You don't really need my belated commentary (the film only came to Brussels in December 2009) - IMDB has close to 100 links to worldwide blog and newspaper and magazine reviews.  But the film is so good, and its effect so profound, that I can't refrain from enthusing.

"The Gift of Last Memories" is the line that appears on the posters for the US release, and that about sums it up.  This is not a film about (a) morticians or (b) cellists.  Well, not only about "coffiners," a uniquely Japanese institution whose job is to prepare the dead before placement in coffins and eventual cremation.

What Departures is really about is Love.  What it means to stick with someone when their lifelong dream of fame as a concert cellist go the way of the industrial closures rampant throughout Japan.  The love for people who have been part of your life, and who then are suddenly gone.  The love that some people come to have for their chosen occupation, and who approach it as an art.

One of the advantages of the vagaries of international distribution is that this film was released here in time for Christmas.  While Departures isn't a "Christmas movie," it does feature Christmas in Japan, and it is White.  But the feel - despite the subject matter - is definitely one for the Christmas season.  There is humor, but mostly at the outset, as we are brought into the singular world of the coffiners.

There are several vignettes, where the focus is on the families of the deceased, as we come to appreciate the young apprentice's growing mastery of his trade.  The country that has given us kabuki theater and Benihana ("Now Playing") was bound to approach death with a certain amount of stylization.  But you ain't been to a funeral 'til you've been to a Japanese "coffining."

In the West, we tend to be increasingly separated from such rites of passage.  Like the old, the dead are often invisible.  Families divide into open casket versus closed coffin camps, and the "undertaker" is viewed with the same distance or even disdain as shown by the uninformed Japanese in Departures.  Until Death comes close to home.  Which is does to all of us.  As we watched Departures in our comfortable cinema seats, one elderly member of our family passed away...

But rather than shut it out of our minds, embrace Death with a flourish, like our coffiners.  Watching Departures, I even considered a Japanese-style departure in my will.  As one of the admiring relatives says in the film, "she never looked so beautiful."  What a way to go.

Candles, Candlemas, and Saint Blaise

If on Candlemas day it be shower and rain
Winter's gone and will not come again.

English traditional proverb

The above is from Wilson's Almanac, which appears to be a zany Australian's way of pulling together minutiae about every feast, commemoration, or anniversary on any given day.  There's a whole lot more there on Candlemas and Ground Hog Day.

Last year on February 2nd I wrote a post on the same subject, and the links are probably still good.

In Brussels on this Candlemas Day (known as Chandeleur in French-speaking countries), it be snow and cold, so I'm not sure what that means for winter.  But we did have the traditional crepes, so I'm not complaining.

My "clip art" file on this computer's Word suite only has a drawing of a Kinara for candles, but that's close enough.  I had to look up Kinara on Wikipedia - now I know.

Since we're on matters of religion and the calendar, you might want to know that tomorrow 3 February is Saint Blaise Day.  As a little Catholic in the States attending parochial school, the nuns were always sure to have our throats blessed to prevent choking from fish bones.  As good little Catholics, we were certain to ingest fish every Friday, since eating meat was forbidden.

Happy Candlemas, and be sure to chew your fish well if you haven't gotten Saint Blaise's blessing with candles crossed on your throat.  And don't light the candles.

When Egypt Was Also Mediterranean & Levantine

I haven't - yet - seen Nadia Kamel's Salata Baladi (House Salad), her documentary about her multi-national, multi-confessional extended family in Egypt.  But today's BBC World Service program "Heart and Soul" (available here in podcast) provides a delightful introduction her film.

The notion of Egypt as a "land of opportunity" for Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, Armenians and others might strike readers as surprising - isn't Egypt a poor country, suffering high unemployment, a major aid recipient?  Ah, but it was not always so.

And it wasn't just related to the construction and maintenance of the Suez Canal.  The preponderance of French and Italian car mechanics made a lasting linguistic impression; names for car parts are Arabized versions of terms left behind by Jean-le-mecano.

When we lived in Alexandria in the early eighties, there were still remnants of these communities.  The Greek had been the largest - several hundred thousand - though by 1983 they had dwindled to a couple of thousand.  The others were even smaller.  There was still a lingering sense of what Lawrence Durrell might have observed while gathering material for the Alexandria Quartet.

The BBC program features interviews with filmmaker Nadia Kamel (who was a longtime assistant to the late Youssef Chahine) and Professor Khaled Fahmy of New York University. They trace the often complicated family histories that resulted from this influx of foreigners into 19th and 20th century Egypt.  For anyone who knows Egypt or Egyptians, the radio program's combination of music, excerpts from the film, and conversation succeeds in evoking the gentle warmth of Egyptians.

Egypt is not only Mediterranean and Levantine - but today it is easy to forget that it also has this rich multicultural heritage.  Probably the best place to get a feel for this side of Egypt is Alexandria, the metropolis on the Mediterranean so dear to the heart of Youssef Chahine.  Listen to the BBC podcast, and hear why Egypt does not always equate to Arab, Arab does not always connote Muslim, and Islam is not the only religion in the Middle East's most populous country.

Public Diplomacy Press & Blog Review: John Brown's Return

The following is sheer non-commercialism in the cause of spreading the word on behalf of a valued institution.  John Brown, fellow former FSO and refugee from the Bush Administration, who used to publish the highly-respected "Public Diplomacy Press And Blog Review" for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, is back after a hiatus of several months.  New location, same title ("Version 2.0"):

http://publicdiplomacypressandblogreview.blogspot.com/

It's spare, but no wonder: September 1 (American Labor Day, as it happens) was the site's launch.  Be among the first to read it!  John, welcome back to the blogosphere.

Française - Can You Ever Go Home Again?

Ireland, which until it became a Celtic tiger and had to import workers, used to have one export: people.  Many, including your correspondent's parents, wound up in America.  When they returned to Ireland - sometimes only after a brief stay in the US to earn some money - they were known as "Yanks," even if they remained in Ireland for the rest of their lives.

With millions of maghrebins and their descendants in France, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe, the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia have plenty of cross-Med visitors all year round, but especially in the summer, as families fill up their cars with goodies and hop on car ferries in Marseille and elsewhere for Algiers, Tunis, Oran, and Tangier. As in Souad El Bouhati's latest film, entitled simply Française, some of these families decide to stay "home."  But are they simply transplanted immigres, French, or what?  And haven't they heard Thomas Wolfe's admonition, "You Can't Go Home Again?"

For Sofia, played by French revelation Hafsia Herzi (La Graine et le Mulet), "home" is France.  We see a glimpse of her life in France as an eight year old, and all the elements that cause problems in later life - coldly traditional mother, loving but uncommunicative father, "feminine" but slightly airhead sister - are sketched in the film's first ten minutes.  After the family's station wagon heads off for the port in the dead of the morning, the film fades to the teenage Sofia under a bright Moroccan sky.

She's a sort of tomboy helping out on her parents' farm when she's not excelling at school, her favorite shoes are what the Brits call "wellies," and she's desperate to return to France.  That's the story.

So if you think that all films by the growing stable of francophone directors of North African origin are coming-of-age, finding-yourself, cultural identity vehicles, and that there is nothing more to be gained by seeing yet another one after L'Esquive or La Graine et le Mulet, then maybe Française is not for you.  But if you like to glean cultural tidbits (like the girls-only boarding house for students away from the farm), or if you might enjoy another stunning performance by Cannes winner of the Meilleur espoir féminin in 2008, then I recommend Française.

Hafsia Herzi, in an interview with Frédéric Bouchaud in Cityvox.fr, said that she had found the script Sofia a bit "annoying," but was asked by the director to make her character "touching."  Stick with Herzi 'til the film's ending, where I defy any actor to find a wordless depiction of "touching" to top hers. 

How does Herzi deal with her cultural identity?  "Above all, I am French," she tells Bouchaud.  In addition to breaking into the directorial world with a short film in the making, she's been looking at scripts where the characters are called, as she says, "Juliette, Charlotte, and Magalie," all non-beur French names.  If any "beurette" can pull off such a crossover, it is this feisty twenty-one year old from Marseille.

Posthumous Blogging: The Orwell Diaries Start Saturday 9 August

This post is in the realm of a public service announcement: the good people of the Orwell Prize, the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly, and the Media Standards Trust will start publishing George Orwell's diary, 70 years day for day, starting tomorrow. Check it out here. This is their concept:

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens. From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

I'm so enjoying Graham Greene's "Collected Essays" from the same period that I think I'm going to be a regular reader of Orwell's "blog."

Update 10 August: the first entry on 9 August did not disappoint, though Orwell's entry was on snakes, not civil wars.  According to a very nice article in The Telegraph, "George Orwell Would Have Blogged," Allan Massie shows that Orwell's eye for detail included an infinite array of subjects:

He delighted in trivia: "C, of my section of the Home Guard, a poulterer by trade but at present dealing in meat of all kinds, yesterday bought 20 zebras which are being sold off by the zoo. Only for dog-meat, presumably, not human consumption. It seems rather a waste" (April 24, 1941)

Glad to see that even during the Blitz the stiff upper lip allowed such niceties for doggies.  Massie reminds us that "the diaries have already been published in the 20-volume Complete Works, edited by Peter Davison, while excerpts from his wartime diary were included in the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, first published by Secker & Warburg in 1968, and then by Penguin two years later."  For those who like to read in bed or along a gurgling stream, this might be a better bet.

Chaotic Cairo: Egypt Loses Its Image-Maker, Youssef Chahine

(Image source: Tadrart.com)

The newspapers of the world are full of Youssef Chahine obituaries and testimonials (Ali Dilem's drawing in Algeria's Liberte is very touching), so I won't add to the confusion... or should I say "Fawda" (Chaos), the title of Chahine's last film.  I have seen a couple of his films, though I cannot count myself a fan.  Chahine's films tend to be unsubtle, a bit obvious, and not even the best that Egyptian cinema can offer - I much preferred Marwan Hamed's 2007 The Yacoubian Building, for its grasp of contemporary Egyptian society.

But Youssef Chahine is/was for much of the world Mr. Egyptian Cinema.  And his Egypt - secular, outward-looking, cosmopolitan, multicultural - is under threat.  The "Chaos" of his last film (I do want to see it, if only for that reason) reflects the transition from the usual chaotic, shambolic, overcrowded country at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Africa - but one legendary for its friendly, tolerant people, who have a special word for "contentment" - to a more deadly chaos born of religious intolerance and rule by a stultifying, corrupt government that hasn't changed in decades.

Thanks to an old friend who was my boss at the American Consulate in Alexandria (Chahine's home town, of which he was so proud he made several films in its honor) in the early eighties, I read a recent report in Bloomberg by Daniel Williams on Muslim-Christian strife, which conjured up worrying parallels with Lebanon.

Increasing violence between Egypt's Muslims and Coptic Christians is raising alarms that the sectarian hostility besetting Lebanon and Iraq may take root in the Middle East's most populous country.  Egypt's reputation for a live-and-let-live ethos is under assault following recent murders of Copts in Cairo, street fighting in cities including Alexandria and a pitched battle between Muslims and Coptic monks at an ancient desert monastery.  "The divisions are deepening,'' Hala Mustafa, editor of the political journal Democracy Review, said in a telephone interview.  "There's a growing Islamization of Egypt, and the Copts respond by turning inward in a defensive stance.  ''Muslims and Copts -- who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's 78 million citizens and are the country's most-populous minority -- increasingly identify themselves primarily by religion," Mustafa said.

Youssef Chahine, in his own preachy way, dedicated many of his films to fighting this kind of intolerance.  Son of a Christian Lebanese father and a Greek mother, he incarnated Alexandria's melting pot of Mediterranean peoples.

So if there is mourning over Youssef Chahine, it is in part over the kind of Egypt he represented, where Cairo was the Hollywood of the Middle East, and secular Arab nationalism - though its founder Gamal Adbel Nasser could sometimes be a thorn in the side of the West - is a matter of wistful nostalgia, compared to the contemporary dangers of obscurantism.  Chahine's cinema, with touches of Bollywood, was closer to the Italian realism of the fifties and sixties, when the raw images of Italy's postwar urban reconstruction provided the backdrop for social-themed melodrama.  Chahine's oeuvre (click the link to LeMonde's selection of film clips) covered contemporary themes, Arab history, and cinema itself.  He matters, for all those reasons, and Egyptian and Arab film makers have big shoes to fill.

Obama Overseas: One Man Public Diplomacy Triumph

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

Frank Rich, New York Times, Sunday July 27, 2008

(Image: BarackObama.com)

As usual, Frank Rich says in 43 words what others devote entire books trying to convey: the power of images.  Yes, the “Barack Obama Trip to the Middle East and Europe” was a campaign event, and yes, as such the US Embassy in Berlin prevented its diplomats from attending (see Foreign Service blogger LifeAfterJerusalem’s thoughtful explanation of the Hatch Act and its limitations for political activity by career government employees).

But if the embassy had “covered” the event, like it might for any gathering of 200,000 American flag-waving Germans, it might have caught a sense of the international importance of Barack Obama and his quest for the US presidency.  As Frank Rich points out, we haven’t seen this in a very long time.

On the night of September 11, 2001, after a long day “role playing” at an embassy emergency action security scenario – cut short by news of the real life emergency happening in the US – I was at home staying in touch with a large embassy nearby (Washington was shut down).  My phone rang, and it was the duty communications officer telling me of a gathering outside the embassy’s gate.  At first, in the heightened security posture and the tension of the day’s events, it appeared that it was a demonstration.  But no, it was simply a spontaneous flow of local citizens, placing flowers, candles, handwritten messages of condolence and solidarity with the United States in the hour of its tragedy.

You know the rest of the story.  The days, weeks, and months following September 11 saw a continuous flow of the same sentiment, at a personal and a governmental level, from Iceland to Iran.  The world was with us.  Afghanistan, the Taliban, al Qaeda – all the early American actions were supported in word and deed.  Then “you’re with us or you’re against us” and Iraq happened.  The magic was gone, and we are where we are.

Now there is another moment, and whatever Senator Barack Obama said in his speech in Berlin, or the content of his meetings with leaders from Afghanistan’s Karzai to Great Britain’s Brown, matters less than the popular public reaction to the person and the idea of Barack Obama.  Whether you are a Republican McCainiac or Democratic Hillraiser, I challenge you to deny the power that an Obama presidency could bring to America’s engagement with the world.

Public Diplomacy is more than Presidential (candidate) speeches abroad, and deeds must accompany the fine words.  But I have no doubt that an Obama Administration, following an act as unilaterally unpopular as the Bush White House, would begin with a massive reservoir of international good will.  Something that a McWhat’s His Name (sorry, but most people abroad cannot even identify by name the Republican candidate) Administration would struggle to earn, identified as Senator McCain is with the ignominious incumbent.

And while a President McCain might give a morale boost to the over-70 crowd who want to maintain their relevance, there is no question that a President Barack Hussein Obama has already sparked the hopes of millions of young minority political wannabees, from Harlem to Hamburg.  With a head start like this, the "combat-booted" (in Matt Armstrong's words) State Department’s public diplomacy establishment (enthralled by the "war metaphor" according to Pat Kushlis) had better prepare itself for a major overhaul to deal with the flowering of the kind of human-to-human cultural exchange that can build on the Obama Good Will "Bridge" Effect.