The Foreign Service Journal, June 2013

14 JUNE 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL and the United States, was cast from an open call for volunteers, although Miller has worked with local dachshund clubs in the past. In an interview with World Stage, the artist says he chose dachs- hunds because they have a “restricted form” with their tiny legs, but are “still very proud and determined and quite beautiful animals.” He adds that there is a “racial diversity in the breed,” with long and short hair and varying colors, that is “similar to humanity.” Miller, who has previously put on mul- timedia installations on greyhounds and reconstructions of the modernist monkey enclosures at the Berlin Zoo, has presented “Dachs- hund U.N.” elsewhere, but this was its North American debut. It was also the first time it had been performed in an indoor theater. This budget cares for our most valuable resource, and that’s the personnel, the men and women of the State Department and USAID who are on the front lines. We have requested $4.4 billion to fortify our worldwide security protection and improve our overseas infrastructure. $2.2 billion of this is set aside for constructing secure diplomatic facilities. And this is part of our commitment to implement in full the recommendations of the independent Accountability Review Board, so that we can mitigate the risk of future tragedies like the one we suffered last year in Benghazi. I’m not going to come here and promise you we’re not going to see another terrible incident. There’s no way anybody can promise you that. We can’t have 100-percent security. We can do the best we can, and we can probably address some of that today. Just two weeks ago I was in Afghanistan, and one of my control officers, Anne Smedinghoff, who was just laid to rest today, was a superb, brilliant, bright, committed Foreign Service officer. She took part in a major women’s event that we did there. And she wanted to make a difference in the world, and she was delivering books in Urdu to kids among the millions of kids going to school because of what we’ve been able to do to change. And this was the type of thing that’s been happening. There have been a thousand of those events, and it was just the wrong moment, wrong time. But Anne and Ambassador Chris Stevens represent the same kind of quality of individual that comes to work in this endeavor, which is taking America’s values and our interests and trying to share them with other people in the world, and trying to open up opportunities for them and make the world a safer and better place. This has been a hard year for the State Department family, a family that knows exactly how risky the work that we signed up for can be in a dangerous world. As Secretary, my job is to make sure we protect these people, and frankly, it’s all of our job. I think you know that we cannot do it by retreating from the world. We stand for optimism. We stand for opportunity. We stand for equality. And we stand in opposition to all those who would replace hope with hate, who replace peace with violence and war. That’s what we believe. That’s what America is at the best, and those are the values of the State Department and USAID that I intend to defend every single day. — Excerpted from Secretary of State John Kerry’s April 17 opening remarks at hearings on the Fiscal Year 2014 foreign affairs budget, held by th e House Foreign Affairs Committee and b y the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs. Here is how Emily Senger describes the spectacle for the March 1 issue of MacLean’s magazine: “When the curt ain rises, the crowd laughs and applauds. Calls of ‘Ella, over here, Ella!’ and ‘Walter! Walter!’ punctuate the buzz of conversation, as owners in the audience attempt to get their dogs to perform, or at least look toward the crowd. “After 50 minutes, the curtain drops and the audience groans, something that never happens at the conclusion of a real United Nations Commission on Human Rights [session].” As we go to press, Miller is in Mon- treal to cast local dogs for a May 24-26 run of “Dachshund U.N.” at the Mon- treal Festival TransAmerique. n —Steven Alan Honley, Editor Contemporary Quote Dachshund U.N., created by Bennett Miller (Australia) and photographed by Misha Teixeira.