Book Review – Late to the Party

It’s been a month since I finished the latest collection of essays by long-time friend and FSO colleague, Dan Whitman (Late to the Party). It’s a meal that sticks.

Whitman is both poet and musician. An artist, he reveals in his work the truths we know in our heart but may fail to enunciate. He refashions the mundane into the splendid, applying honesty to his work as an educator (even as a diplomat he was an educator), to his art, and to his living.

This gerund matters. It is the LIVING he projects in his essays, the joy of being present whatever the situation, living that is at once humble, helpful, bold, seeking, observing.

The man would shun the word “genius” but his words give him away: a gift shared with all who take the time to read.

Squashed by the press

Whitman’s collection contains 55 anecdotes, travails, glories, elegies to great men and women we have lost. How to choose? Thematically, on three points, starting with the media.

In “Mattress Man” Whitman casually observes the number of times Pretoria’s thieves have relieved him of his possessions: “Our little row house had been invaded four times, no great harm had been done. We’d gotten used to these things…Coming back in the evening to a break-in became part of the routine.”

The fifth occasion, carried out while the narrator dutifully greets guests at the embassy 4^th of July reception, proved the last straw. “Beds, chairs, linens, the works. Luckily the thieves had crawled out of the window at the landing when they heard me returning home, so we didn’t have to confront them.”

Time for spikes on the wall, Whitman decides, and we learn that thieves are only one enemy. Another is the deputy chief of mission, a General Dreedle and Colonel Cathcart rolled into one for this bureaucratic black comedy: “Bureaucracy will always find a way of making bad things worse.”

The DCM tells his subordinate: “The lease says only the owner can make alterations.”

Our protagonist insists they try and the DCM grows limper: “Not now. Plus, they never call back.” Besides, he reasons, “Any thief could get hold of a mattress and go over your wall, spikes and all.”  

“When did you last see a guy on Arcadia Street carrying a mattress?”

“The point isn’t whether I’ve seen one. The point is that there could be one.” Obvious solutions against grave consequences meet magical thinking and bland ineffectuality.

“What a shame it would be if the Pretoria News were to get hold of this story,” the aggrieved observes, and at 6 a.m. the following day arrive the spike installation crew.

Our embassy spokesperson also deploys his press credentials to upend the dizzying horrors of a seven-nation congressional delegation led by squash-fiend and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA), set during a late-Nineties government shut-down, when officers of the United States mustn’t work and still must get the job done—including time on the squash court and hours around town scrounging a specific type of ball.

“If I were TV news,” comes the leak, “I would lead with a picture of a squash ball and a text: ‘One squash ball. Bill to the U.S. taxpayer $100,000.’”

Met with a press scrum on arrival in Cape Town and an escalating media disaster, Specter’s CODEL departs two days later for home rather than the full itinerary tormenting unpaid government workers across the continent.

Performing arts

In “The Florence Aldridge School of Dance” Whitman recounts a time in 1980 when the U.S. Embassy in Congo brought a Lakota Sioux dance troupe for a joint performance with dancers at the Ballet Nationale Congolais.

Whitman, not yet a diplomat, teaches English at the local university and is asked to interpret French/English for the performers. What he sees onstage the author calls “aesthetic calamity.”

“There was no common dance language either could explain to the other. I, the non-dancer, tried to demonstrate following indications from each side. The session dissolved into laughter because the culture shock was just too great.”

Whitman finally figures what’s behind the failure to synchronize: “The Congolese were dancing from the hip, the Lakota from the feet and ankles. Cultural patterns established over the millennia were just so very different, and quick adaptation was just not going to happen.”

He concludes: “No, people are not “the same everywhere.””

Differences can be hurdles, and hurdles can be overcome with respect. Take the tap-dance exchange program Whitman manages in Bangkok, decades later, where the culture rejects showing the bottom of a shoe or any part of one’s foot: “The equivalent of ‘mooning’ in Thai culture.”

Whitman explains this in advance to his visitor, aware the tap-dancer would likely demonstrate how the taps create percussive thunder.

The show must go on, so Fred tells his audience, “Now I know that showing the bottom of the foot is not acceptable in Thailand. So here I will remove the shoe from my foot and lift it in my hand to show where the taps are, and I’ll keep my feet hidden.”

The normally-reserved audience roars with laughter, understanding the lengths Fred had taken to twist cultural respect to get his point across. “They could have seen his shtick as even more offensive than just lifting his foot and showing the taps,” Whitman observes, “but they went beyond delight to see his well-intentioned gesture.

“Respect matters more than protocol.”

Tinged with sadness

This collection includes a greater number of tributes to the departed in Whitman’s life than previous publications, a sign that time is passing. Among those he pays tribute to:

Czech radio personality Eva Kopecka, 2009, whom he meets during the heady Prague Spring of 1967, a year before the Soviet invasion. She takes a call in her smoky studio and explains: “That was the Party. They said they were listening to my program and cautioned me not to refer to the Bible ever again on the air.”

After Soviet tanks roll into the city, she remains for a week the “Single, plucky radio broadcasting bravely to the Czech public, driving the Soviets crazy when they weren’t able to find the station and destroy it.”

She will be snatched, “re-educated,” and released after a year, only to wait two decades more for the yoke to finally be lifted.

Next, Mike Norton, who “Exceeded the bounds of journalistic purism during the coup of 1991, when he implored friends in the Haitian parliament to stay out of the process and deny to the military the ostensible legitimacy of their presence.”

Over eighteen years and 3,000 dispatches, he kept the world informed of Haiti’s turbulence using a Radio Shack modem, primitive, pre-computer Tandy, and a car battery. He passed away in 2008.

More recently, 2022, came the passing of Ghanaian economist George Attiyey. Whitman draws our attention to advice shared in Attiyey’s 2011 book Defeating Dictators, including: “Confront despots with their own constitution; Circumvent restrictions on freedom of expression; Use ridicule.”

To take a final thought from earlier in Whitman’s career, as copyboy aged 18: “Keep your finger on the toilet bowl of life.” He calls this good advice: “Don’t expect too much of it but give it a try and you might find things getting better.”

D.W. Hitman strikes again

If ever there’s a smile he does not intend, the eyes will surely wink and sizzle. Joy fills this man’s heart. Where not joy, it’s understanding or derision, which can be the same thing.

I doubt Whitman will like or even accept poet, musician, artist, genius. But his words betray him.

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