Often it is understood that a skill or a talent can be found throughout all of society. This is a difficult proposition. This means that there are some unsavory people who are good at what you like. Just think how unbearable that really is. This type of nitpicking only increases the more specialized and valuable the skill. Often it is looked at as a cold hard truth to be dismissive and cruel on something that matters so much. However this has no bearing on Good & Evil in Diplomacy, and where it is shrewd to shrink the pool of competition; In the circle of diplomacy it isn’t clever to make something zero sum. Ask any diplomat or soldier what zero sum means and the answer is armed conflict.
The notion of diplomacy is a very wide notion and is better understood for beginners as a heuristic than a schema with fixed things. What works to understand a school teacher doesn’t work with something that is so varied as a diplomat. If you break down what to put in the talent stack of a diplomat. I wouldn’t think of playing ping pong, or how to fire a gun as works of diplomacy. However let us remind ourselves of Kissinger’s ping pong diplomacy, or Lawrence of Arabia brandishing a gun. These are diplomats and where there is a professional diplomat we are bound to find a higher number of unprofessional diplomats.
There is something to be considerate, as with diplomacy as a career there are hobbyist as well. This is a very repulsive thought, and can be summed up completely by Benjamin Franklin.
The miscellaneous things
As much as I love an interesting character I wouldn’t want to be Benjamin Franklin’s Boss nor would I want to go party with him. From the accounts of going on a trip to France for business just to come across every brothel from New York to Paris.
Don’t even start with him showing up drunk, in modern day a character like Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t be tolerated. The vast majority of characters throughout history wouldn’t be invited to our dinner table. If we were honest we probably wouldn’t hire them for customer service.
If we take a look at Dennis Rodman this is what I see, a character that is trapped by modern day devices. His personal blemishes would not be apparent under candle light and a feather pen. If we had video of all the time Benjamin Franklin tried to sling some dick and got rejected. We couldn’t look at him the same. However because a few years go by Franklin becomes something akin to Jesus or dinosaurs.
Something infallible because of the passage of time, we need to be careful creating these pictures in our head of a formal past. One which is perfect and not littered with mistakes and unprofessionalism.
The thing that wins out against Professionalism, is instincts. This comes as little surprise to a dove or a hawk; however a massive surprise to those in the state department. We must be mindful of what this word instinct means.
Instincts
(a natural skill or propensity of a specific kind)
This does not mean barbarism or heathenism. however it is a tribal skill, that is dealing with the tribes “in-group” and foreign tribes “out-group”. In this sense we can see diplomacy was something before a career, something deeper.
When Dennis Rodman got a random call from the DPRK, his first reaction to a brutal regime wasn’t enmity. His instinctual response was to see something utterly alien and talk to it. I can’t stress this enough how few people have that instinctual response. If we were to take the applicants of the United states foreign service and drop them off in a bad part of Memphis Tennessee I doubt they would do that good.
Dennis the menace
The Rebounder of legend, what I see was not just a person who knew where the ball was going to go. But a man who knew where people were going to go. This is not just important on the basketball court but in diplomacy. Sadly we have to measure his greatness as a basketball player, and not a diplomat. So when we look at his interesting efforts this is a man who has all the correct instincts. Without the formal training of a diplomat, he has the training of a pro-basketball player
The state department lost a top draft pick to the Chicago Bulls, this is the “bad timeline” of events. Dennis is an intuitive feeler and is bound to see the lines in the sand or the court as feelings. When he got accepted in the NBA he was rewarded to be this Dennis we know. If things went differently, he would have learned to pivot his emotions, and direct others’ attention in a non-exaggerated manner. I can’t stress this enough, being able to sympathize without forming a view of clientelism is an even rarer thing. That Dennis has been proven to be able to do with the DPRK.
The important things
Dennis is a broken man who wears his heart on his sleeve and is a real authentic person. He has had real issues with drinking just like Benjamin Franklin. He has some real demons he has to fight with; the way he approaches everything is very rough and crude because of these demons. However his mind is always pointing north in a sense. Furthermore his instincts are infallible even when he is.
