As I’ve confessed on this blog before, my own transition from the UK to the USA included a number of years as an illegal immigrant. I’ve never made this a central aspect of my professional identity, rather treating it as something along the lines of Bill Clinton’s ‘I didn’t inhale’ approach to some of his youthful indiscretions. But I did what I did. Amnesty in 1987 took care of my legal status, and I’m now a naturalized citizen.

In a fascinating article in today’s Financial Times, legal counsel Patti Waldmeir writes about the “massive absurdity” that the current laws immigration reform proposals are attempting to deal with - on the one hand US companies employ millions of illegal workers (ya can’t get no stinkin’ welfare if ya ain’t legal!) and the US government pretends it does not notice.

This is about to change. The Bush administration wants to end the charade. US employers will be asked to match 8 million workers with “woefully inaccurate Social Security databases” and be held liable if the numbers don’t match. Corporate America says the rules will cost $100m to implement.

Waldmeir concludes that the proposed rules are “an absurd new hindrance to the American dream” and “the US economy will continue to stand or fall by the hard work of its illegal immigrants”.

Hear hear.

Of all the ‘elephants in the room’ in the USA, the underclass of the undocumented workers and the crucial services they provide is one of the more obvious. Together with gays in the military; social security entitlements; a nuclear arsenal which can destroy all life on Earth many times over; 40m citizens with no health insurance and the bloated size of many automobiles and the bottoms which sit therein. All issues which define an age, but sit unexamined as part of the taken-for-granted world we inhabit. Not discussed in polite society and often too politically ‘hot’ for serious debate. Yet future generations may wonder “What were they thinking?”

Well, what do you think?

Jackie Wullschlager’s review of British Victorian artist John Everett Millais in the Weekend Financial Times brought me face-to-face with one of the essential elements of my heritage: the suppressed yearnings of the patriarchs of the UK at the height of their power for virginal innocence.

On the one hand Industrial Britain was all about iron & steel, grit & determination, mad dogs in the noon-day sun and gunboat diplomacy. The British in the 19th Century imposed their will across continents. They were men of action whose deeds brought them prosperity and the certainty that God was an Englishman.

Yet, as Wullschlager comments, Millais’s paintings illustrate how the Victorian sensibility was “obsessed with preindustrial innocence” which found expression, above all, in an infantilism which art celebrated by “arresting childhood on canvas.”

We’re talking little girls; sultry portraits of sweet things “whose ruby lips, longing gaze and flowing burnished hair make today’s teen models look chiselled and chaste by comparison.” Yearning virgins with a “subterranean sexual charge”.

But what possible relevance can the repressed sexuality of an imperial power obsessed with foreign adventures and fraught with fundamentalist alarm about moral codes have today?

I can’t possibly imagine. Can you?

One of the more interesting things about my job at Hewlett-Packard is meeting customers in the Executive Briefing Center. Sales teams from around the world bring customers to HP’s headquarters for a variety of reasons - to close a deal, discuss the latest technology with engineers or develop relationships with key executives.

Many of the meetings kick-off with a company overview and I’m one a number of HP employees called on to give the the ‘HP Today’ presentation.

Since many customers come from across the country and around the world this can often be as much an update on Silicon Valley as it is specifically about HP.

In the last couple of months I’ve spoken to Catholic priests from Korea; MBA students from China; Japanese bankers; spies from Sweden (OK, “signals intelligence operatives” from Sweden) and bureaucrats from Britain.

I’m struck by the fact that for many visitors to Hewlett-Packard the experience of seeing how business is done in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area must be as strange as, say, a trip to Haight-Ashbury was for Midwesterners in the Summer of Love, 40 years ago.

The visiting delegations are homogeneous: Chinese engineers come from China; Koreans come from Korea; middle-aged Caucasian males come from IT departments across the USA.

They fly in to one of the most ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan, mongrel areas on earth.

Silcion Valley’s competitive edge is that it is a unique habitat for innovation and entrepreneurship. It all started with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tinkering in their garage in 1939 and the pace of change has been relentless ever since.

Unlike many regions, companies in Silicon Valley have access to a high quality and mobile workforce comprised of talented people from around the world. No one racial group is in a majority. This ethnic diversity fosters an equality of opportunity startling even by American standards — 39% of all residents were born in a foreign country. In contrast to the more rigid social hierarchies of Europe, the Valley operates a results oriented meritocracy where talent and ability are king. The region’s merit-based system of rewards encourages the best and brightest to knock themselves out in hopes of being part of the next new, new thing.

What is remarkable about the Valley is the lack of an identifiable landmark. Unlike instantly recognizable symbols such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris; Big Ben in London; Times Square in New York or the Ginza district in Tokyo, there’s no building or street which symbolizes the place. As Po Bronson remarks in his amusing book The Nudist on the Late Shift, it’s not the buildings or physical surroundings which distinguish Silicon Valley, it’s the people. And they are sometimes as wacky as the hippies in the Haight in 1968. There really was a programmer in one Silicon Valley company who chose to work the night shift so he could sit at his computer au natural.

Walk the corridors HP, or any company in the Valley, and you’ll hear as many accents from Asia, Europe and Latin America as you will from the United States. It’s something the visitors to the region would do well to notice. For it’s an undeniable fact that immigrants to the area are responsible for much of the wealth. Sun Microsystems was started by a German engineer getting together with an Indian businessman; Google billionaire Sergey Brin came from Russia, albeit at the age of six; dozens of other Silicon Valley companies were founded by Indian and Chinese immigrants.

Pascal Zachary argues persuasively that diversity defines the health and wealth of nations in today’s world. What he calls ‘mongrel’ mixes of people fare better than regions other regions, such as “the great monocultures of Germany and Japan.” Whereas Germany does have immigrants, they are mostly kept outside the mainstream, as guestworkers. The Japanese remain uneasy with the idea of absorbing outsiders into the mainstream.

There’s an amusing story when, back in the Summer of Love, Grey Line (aptly named!) started bringing mid-western tourists through the Haight to gawp at the hippies, the flower children held up mirrors to the bus windows. The mirrors reflected back upon the tourists the wonder, shock or fear they experienced when they saw the free thinkin’, free lovin’ tripped-out voyagers of the new culture (some of whom, like Cap’n Crunch, inspired Jobs and Wozniak; others like Stewart Brand were early into the web.)

It may be that, by visiting Silcion Valley, businesspeople from elsewhere have a mirror held up to their own culture.

A new book, The Great Speeches of Modern India, catalogs religious, economic and political speeches of the 19th and 20th Century. The author, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, presents a view of modern Indian history through the speeches of her leaders.

I have not been able to locate a convenient source for the book, but this review contains some fascinating commentary. He contrasts speeches by world leaders such as Churchill, Gandhi and Nehru, who wrote their own content, with today’s reliance on speech writers ‘ghosting’ the speech which began with JFK and Ted Sorensen. Modern politicians, he claims “don’t feel confident enough to handle the language in the succinct way a speech-writer can.”

Mukherjee observes the distinction between great speakers and great speeches:

Great speakers do not always make great speeches. The yardstick for judging the latter is whether the words retain their power with the passing of time. Nehru was not a great orator in the traditional sense of the term, his voice was not loud and words did not come in a torrent as they do with great orators, he did not pause for effect but he made many memorable speeches and coined phrases that have become part of the nation’s vocabulary.

Finally, he refers to the stunning address given by Vivekananda at the Chicago World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. The 7,000 delegates went into rapture and responded with a standing ovation that lasted for more than three minutes:

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. l thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of the millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.

Since India is one of the great sources of speeches given in the English language, this book, when it more widely available, will be a valuable addition to any speakers’ library.

In the final hours of the 2007 NSA Conference I sought out the person responsible for the Agenda - Ian Percy, CSP, CPAE.

This conference has been seen by more than a few as a radical departure from past NSA Conferences. Heated discussions took place in the hallways over everything from the agnostic tone of Randy Gage’s speech on Prosperity Consciousness to the tone of the five minute “Om” chant, and, as was humorously observed, the glazed-over tones of the NSA Youth singing in praise of Afghanistan’s largest cash-crop, the tall Poppy.

So I asked Ian: What have people been saying to you about this year’s conference?

To hear what he says, you know what you need to do. That’s right - click on the podcast icon below.

 

 Ian Percy Interview [3:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Fundamental to all communication is the point of view of the person who is communicating. Speech, literature, poetry and art all communicate the point of view of the speaker, author, poet or artist.

Is art possible where the self who is the source of the art is absent? Where there is no ‘point of view’? Where, instead of an artist proclaiming ‘I know I know I know’, there is the direct presentation of reality itself?

The Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition opened this week.

Visitors to Venice can enjoy the work of over 100 artists from around the world. 76 national pavilions and 34 collateral artists are exhibiting in an event termed the Olympics of the art world.

One collateral artist stands apart. He is not a known entity in the art world. He is not communicating an egoic point of view. He is not, in fact, present at the event. He is a Western-born spiritual master offering a unique form of visual communication free of subjectivity. His exhibit is called Transcendental Realism: The Art of Adi Da Samraj.

Adi Da writes that his art communicates the “structure of perception” from beyond the confines of an ego:

The illusion of egoity is that, somehow, the world is being generated from your own position, or being shown to your position. That suggests the idea that the human being must make the measure of reality and control it—whereas reality is actually self-generated, beyond “point of view”, beyond control, prior to “point of view”, prior to control, prior to separateness. You could say the work I am doing is “Reality-Art”, or (as I call it) “Transcendental Realism”.

The question is, how can a person create art beyond the confines of an ego? This is possible only if that person has transcended the ego. Has Adi Da done this? Judge for yourself.

My favorite FT columnist Harry Eyres writes in the Weekend Edition (subscription required) about the tragic lack of diversity in the modern world. The march to a monoculture extends from crops (all maize all the time) to literature (all Harry Potter all the time) to language (all English or Mandarin all the time).

Language loss is a topic addressed anthropologist Wade Davis at the wonderful TED Conference. His 2003 talk on endangered cultures argues language isn’t just a collection of vocabulary and grammatical rules. In fact, “Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.” The languages of the planet are being lost at the rate of 6 a week - 50% of the world’s 6,000 languages, he says, have disappeared in our lifetime and “are no longer being whispered into the ears of children.”

This lack of diversity removes different ways of making sense out of the world, forever. Whole networks of living relationships disappear. Those of us left inhabiting the vast monocultures of English, Spanish, Mandarin and French must work harder to capture different ways of seeing. Different cultures create different realities. Different realities of lead to different discoveries.

A monoculture sows and sees the same thing, everywhere.

Eyres concludes by quoting the Emperor Charles V, who on seeing the cathedral his architect had constructed in the middle of the great mosque of Córdoba, stated “You have destroyed what was unique to replace it with what could be found anywhere.”

So what differentiates your discoveries?

Wonderful story in the San Francisco Chronicle this week about the small Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. You have to love the town for its name alone. A name to conjure with: Why-oh-why in Hay-on-Wye? And who woulda thunk that in May, Hay was twinned with the Malian city of Timbuktu?

Why-oh-wye indeed.
The town is a now famous destination for book lovers from around the world. The annual literary festival attracts the likes of Al Gore, Bob Geldof, Cate Blanchett, and Elvis Costello. Bill Clinton called it a “Woodstock of the Mind” (claiming, no doubt, that he browsed but did not inhale). It’s a quaint British market town with forty bookstores and as many pubs. Sounds wonderful.

While America boasts a variety of ‘destination towns’ such as “The Live Music Show Capital of the World” Branson, Missouri, B&B destination Mendocino, California and, of course Sin City itself, Las Vegas I’m not aware of any other UK destination town apart from Hay-on-Wye for books. “What’s read in Hay, stays in Hay”.

Just as Vegas needed Mobster Bugsy Sigel to launch it, Hay-on-Wye needed its don — the improbable anarchist eccentric Richard Booth is the self-appointed King of Hay.

He set up the first bookshop in town in the 1960’s. The well-heeled Oxford graduate bought the 800-year-old Hay Castle and, seeing no apparent contradiction between a belief in anarchism and self-proclaimed monarchism, set himself up as the “King” of the town lording it over an Empire of books. Dusty books. Brown books. Books with broken spines and books of fine vellum. Paperback and hardback. Soft core and scientific. All became part of his kingdom which prospered mightily until it is as it has now become: a rural fastness for bibliophiles.

Expressing an opinion that would get him tarred and feathered in many towns in rural America, Booth states “I feel the right to read a cheap book is more important than the right to bear arms.”

The festival is a marvelous smorgasbord of cross-cultural literary entertainment. Here, in no particular order, are some random snips from a small fraction of the events being held between 24 May and 3 June:

The causes and implications of our terrible war of attrition against the native mammals and birds of England and Wales from the middle ages to the present day….25 years of contemporary Turkish society….bilingual Welsh poet (Perfect Blemish) reads and talks with the Israeli poet, translator and publisher…the charismatic anatomist explores the vital organs and functions of the human body…how recent developments in cosmology and particle physics have led to the remarkable realization that our universe – rather than being unique – could be just one of many universes….traces her heroine’s options for losing her virginity from the Gambia to London, Boston and Mali …the significance of the Prophet for some of today’s most controversial issues…Rugby’s greatest full-back talks about his career with his biggest fan…Nigerian Nobel Laureate…the documentary about China’s building boom explores the idea that the concrete revolution has destroyed more than the cultural revolution…the Indian novelist…the great Welsh-Chinese short story writer…the Super Furry Animals singer-songwriter talks music, politics and the subtle art of being angry…the brilliant Syrian journalist…can Islam and democracy ever find common ground?…Bollocks, I wish I’d said that….the amazing tale of the brilliant and sexually voracious Welsh psychoanalyst…el rhan o ddathliadau penblwydd Radio Cymru yn drideg, bydd gohebydd gwleidyddol y BBC, Guto Harri, yn cadeirio trafodaeth fywiog ar hynt cyfrwng sydd yn parhau i oroesi ac addasu yn wyneb…the Australian polymath…a conversation with three of the greatest stars of contemporary Hispanic literature – Cercas (The Speed of Light), Grandes (The Wind From The East) and Abad Faciolince (Olvido Que Seremos)….the Sri-Lankan-born broadcaster and writer…Vivienne Westwood - The iconoclast fashion Dame…the editor of leading Israeli daily Haaretz discusses how to run a newspaper…the victory of shopping over politics, the collisions of government and people, and the resilience, comedy, cars and greatness of Britannia…the Castillian writers are joined by British actors…DUE TO CHANGES IN THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN PAKISTAN IMRAN KHAN HAS HAD TO POSTPONE HIS VISIT UNTIL 2008…the ancient tales of Prometheus and Pandora, Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and son beg the eternal question: just because you can, does that mean you should?…a series of walks to local farms…Morris Dancers…egocentric writers…the origins of Christian anti-Semitism… The Ghostwriters Séance - The inside track on the great act of literary ventriloquism…he wry comedy of Rhodes’ Gold and the Nigerian-London-Cuban dislocations of Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House…the chaos, corruption and sexual depravity of the 1815 Congress of Vienna…Bob Geldof in Concert…a 100-day, 1500-mile journey with camels from Lake Chad to Tripoli accompanied by a Chinese scientist, a 77-year-old Kenyan rancher, warring tribesmen and Gaddafi’s secret police…Craswall farmers life under the Black Hill…Tamasin Day Lewis…Roy Hattersley…Adrian Tinniswood…Geraldine McCaughrean…Guillaume Canet…Karate princesses, seasick pirates and demon vacuum cleaners…subject to hygiene compliance, visitors may be able to help milk the cows and feed the calves…General Sir Michael Rose examines the parallels between the guerrilla tactics used by Washington against the British in 1775, and by the Sunni insurgents against the Allies in Iraq today…the only overweight gay Bengali GP working the comedy circuit…the Russian novelist…the Yiddish Policeman’s Union…Monty Don discusses his project to engage drug-addicted youngsters in a farming rehabilitation…after the final full-stop.

What other town with a resident population of 1,846 could boast such offerings?

Back on March 30 I entered a Toastmasters Speech Contest in Silicon Valley which was held at SAP. I gave this speech on my first months in the US in the mid-1970’s, when I arrived as a graduate student to study sociology at Tufts University. Every word is true, describing things that actually happened to me.

I won the contest and and went on to the next level. Unfortunately I had added some killer phrases and a compelling conclusion while forgetting to do a word-count or rehearse with a stop-watch. I went over the 7:30 maximum allowed time by a few seconds and was disqualified.

Still, it was ton of fun. An adrenalin rush. Every speechwriter owes it to their clients to stand on the podium from time-to-time. Experience an audience first-hand. Otherwise, you’re like a celibate writing a sex-manual. You might describe the position accurately, but until you assume it yourself you don’t know Jack.

Thanks to Brady for telling me about about an amusing Oddcast demo.

Oddcast does text-to-speech conversion. You can play with the nationality and sex of the speaker. Hear the same words spoken in the voice of Audrey or Charles from the UK. Then skip over to the USA and hear how Claire or Mike would say it. Next, switch to any one of a dozen other nationalities to hear Jolie or Bernard from France; Reiner or Klara from Germany or many others speak.

You could be boring predictable and type in a phrase like “You are so sexy” or more adventurous and cut and paste the text from a Robert Frost poem or the opening words of your next speech.

Beware, you can only play around a few times before the system thanks you for visiting and puts a stop to the fun.

Enjoy!