Patrick Dua

Except for running into Chris by accident a few times at the Heidelberg Office, I didn’t know Chris much during his time in the European Division.

However, way back in the course of the second half of the 1990s, my dear friend and area director Jane McHan - whom I knew to be very interested in the study of native cultures, thought it necessary to plead with me to share whatever African folkloric stories I knew with her. I had told Jane at some point previously that my grandmother’s favorite pastime was narrating tales to me as a way of sending me off to sleep while I was a child. To prevent me from having to hide constantly from Jane’s ‘obsessive’ requests dealing with this issue whenever we met, I settled down during one term break with a view to satisfy Jane’s appetite for stories. I managed to recall from memory and compose a total of seven tales. Not only that.  Also, on account of Jane’s suggestion, I toyed with the idea of publishing my tales as far back as the late 1990s. But that objective failed to materialize when I realized that publishers were asking upfront for the partial payment of publication costs from authors. Those costs sometimes amounted to several thousands – no exaggeration intended on my part!

So, here is the juncture where Chris Payne entered the scene as my publisher, also through the mediation of Jane. This occurred sometime in the summer of 2019.

Jane’s contact with Chris in the Philippines proved to be a very fast and propitious arrangement on behalf of my project. Not long after I passed on my manuscript to Chris and was fully docked in with him through email exchanges, he revealed himself to me as a seasoned, new-age version of tinker, tailor, soldier, spy in yonder territory; a Jack of all trade, and – above all, master of all. Particularly amazed was I, when I read his proposals defining his work process, expectations, costs, and my obligations as the author regarding the publication of my book by LIPA, Chris’s own publishing company. At first I thought: is Chris serious? The initial impression I gained was that either Jane and himself had ‘connived’ to have Chris publish my material almost free of charge, or that Chris had deliberately developed his low-cost company model to function merely as a hobby or a Salvation Army outlet...

In any case, the outcome of my few weeks of collaboration with Chris was an impressive book in terms of cover design, layout, and of course content, which we all admired in the end.

Throughout our exchanges, Chris, in spite of his advancing age, appeared to me to be doing very well health-wise. Sure, he complained occasionally about his fading eyesight, to which I reacted by using bold and large typeface in my emails to facilitate his reading capacity. He was also very outspoken regarding his sentiments on politics, global events as well as against members of the political class he deemed to be villains. As the ravages of the corona virus and other rather mundane scandals of society crowded the global headlines, he received the news of Brexit in particular with outrage, and wrote a lengthy response at the beginning of 2020 addressing that episode. His viewpoints here were directed to the far-flung circles on his address list including myself.

Based probably on his expertise in data processing and information management, Chris staunchly believed that technological invention and its social consequences have outstripped our powers of prediction. That email he wrote marked the last time I heard from Chris. It carried the title “How Big Data Swung The Election For Trump and Helped the British Exit Vote”. This was his own response to an article sent to him earlier by another UMUC ED colleague.

 (I have chosen to post an abridged excerpt of that mail below for your reading pleasure).

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[[….A happy new year! Many thanks for sending me the link to Cambridge Analytics. I enjoyed reading it.

With more data, then political predictions are more focused and specific but, overall, some of the examples described are things which we have known for a while…………… I wonder if the system described is just a more precise way of getting better predictions.

In the UK, one could have guessed that Farage and UKIP would do well in the Brexit vote. Older, uneducated people are more likely to be racist. But it is those same people who have suffered most from job losses because of automation of their jobs. Farage had only to show a picture of a crowd of obvious immigrants to win the thousands of votes. Much of the referendum advertising was pure lies but the psycho-spin doctors who work for the politicos know well that a person's beliefs have little to do with rationality - people will believe what they have been told to believe……………

What I looked for in the article and it didn't answer my questions was why people's personal attitudes have changed so much in the last decade? It seems to me that people have become harder and nastier these last few years. I have been following the Brexit blogs. The language used there is often violent and abusive. Immigrants in the UK, especially Poles, all report that they have been attacked, mostly verbally but sometimes physically, in public. Is this bitterness, which now exists in all modern electorate, because people are somehow being subliminally manipulated by the likes of Cambridge Analytics and Facebook? Or is it a natural consequence of frustration caused by the freedom of big business to use those same algorithmic techniques to force down wages, foreclose on houses, privatize health care and increase inequalities generally etc. at a time when world GDP has increased by 20% in the last 20 years?

Actually I voted to Remain in the EU referendum. But the people were pissed off by the Cameron government and they had subconsciously all decided that someone needed a good kicking. Cameron was out by next morning. Same with Hillary - she gets half a million for making a speech; her friends are all billionaires and yet she pretends to be a champion of the dispossessed. If we are going to be ruled by a corrupt, wealthy war-mongering plutocrat, the US voters may have decided, why not go for the real thing?

We live in interesting times and I am sure the new right-wing world order - UKIP, Trump, Duterte, Le Pen, AfD and the rest will eventually come unstuck. We may be living through the birth pangs of a whole new phase of human history. The worry is what the new baby will look like.  

I am hoping that the sans-culottes have now got all their bitternesses and resentments out of their systems and they will come around to realizing that the Brexit result was turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. Dream on, I hear you say?

Good article if a little disjointed. Maybe that was the translation. I don't have enough German to read the original.

Very best wishes. Stay in touch.

Chris]]

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When I heard on January 6 of this year from Jane that several emails addressed to Chris were bouncing back, I became curious and worried at the same time. But my initial observation conveyed to Jane assumed that Chris’s eyesight might have deteriorated to such a degree that he might no longer be engaged in reading and writing as before. This, indeed, was based on the fact that he had not responded to a few queries of mine since his email input quoted above. Unfortunately my assumption, to say the least, was overly optimistic. The pandemic, we are now well aware alas - did wreak a heavy toll on too many of the best of this world. And Chris fell, sadly, as another casualty.

May the kind and gentle soul of Chris Payne rest in peace!

/….

PS. -- on a different matter:

Has anybody reading this been in contact with Jiri Brezina lately? Jiri is someone I used to visit quite often, whenever I was on my way in his vicinity of Waldhilsbach near Heidelberg. But some years ago he moved permanently back to his native Prague and continued to send me mails every now and then. The last time I saw Jiri was during our Heidelberg get-together of October 2019. In the interim, our exchanges have ceased, since he has not corresponded with me anymore for more than three years..

When Exchanges cease – inexplicably

One day in 1997 when an offer from our Heidelberg Headquarters asked that I participate in an online training for the UMUC Distance Education program, I had no idea what this meant for the future of my standard teaching methods. But once the curtain unfolded for the training to begin, I soon felt that I was in good company, given the large number of UMED colleagues (both known and unknown) who happened to be on the list of participants. As the training proceeded, the names of a number of colleagues immediately registered as reference points on the WebTycho platform, above all, on account of their active and incisive inputs. One such colleague was Warren Johnson, located at Augsburg in Bavaria, as those of you from our first group of European DE faculty might recall. From 2004 until June 2012 our so-called MdFF community grew and transformed into a seasoned marketplace catering to the concerns and teaching interests of the Europe DE faculty. Our individual  postings, opinions, meme identifiers  – whether on education, politics, international affairs or social issues – mapped us out as distinct digital natives. The forum helped to create familiar, and at times, predictable individuals, always engaged in vibrant conversations as a group with each other. Warren was always a key asset in all directions of the various discussions.

One fascinating thing about this was that a lot of us on the MdFF list never personally met, nor were we ever personally to meet, one another. If I am not mistaken, MdFF stood for Maryland Faculty Forum; and Bruce Hull was one of the care-takers. As commonly known, later developments made it necessary for the forum interactions to cease at some point in 2012. But some of us continued afterwards to interact with one another every now and then via email or other forms of social media. Warren and myself were engaged in email exchanges beginning from the early 2000s. Later on, our conversations mostly involved our mutual interests in the DE mentoring program, grassroots news and other happenings in Germany.

Sometime in 2013 before Term II started, Warren wrote he had noticed that I was listed for an evening course at an Ed Center in Stuttgart where he was also scheduled to teach that term. We were both thrilled, because it meant we were going to be meeting each other in person for the first time. On the first day of class, I arrived at the school parking lot long before Warren. When he arrived, he immediately saw me standing nearby and waved to me… What I was not aware of: Warren was wheelchaired. But, he worked himself – with obvious ease - out of his specially adapted van. That maneuver sent out an instinctive signal to me that nothing could subdue the fun and joy of our first encounter.

Being in a wheelchair tends to prompt sympathy in people. There is also an assumption that being wheelchaired implies disability, and hence, incapacity or challenges to negotiate mobility issues. But, like most of us UMED folks, travel had always been a major part of Warren’s teaching career in Europe. And, as far as I could surmise, Warren had overcome any possible impediments in his background with aplomb. Break time was when I visited him downstairs to have a brief chat. His mood, accompanied by his vintage laughter upon seeing me, was always contagious.

At long last, our courses finished when the term came to an end. As I stood in the final wintry night, seeing Warren take off and disappear on his long way back to Augsburg from Stuttgart, I became instantly convinced of the resilience of spirit and the power of human will. It revealed also to me the complexity of some of Warren’s thoughts as I had come to recognize over the years. Being on the teaching trail together with Warren in Term II of 2013 was the first and last time I saw him. It’s never too late to mourn or brood over the passing of a dear one or friend. The last time I tried to contact Warren was during the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020 when much of Germany was on lockdown. For the first time, I received no response. Now, I know why. Without my knowledge, he was no more, having passed away in the previous year.

Warren, definitely, would appreciate me sharing parts of our very last exchange with you below. I think it is deserving of his memory. In a way, his few words here testify to his integrative disposition and the kind of person he really was…

Oh wow, dear Warren!

I just found out that you are also present on the OMA website. I posted something on the "Colleagues Forum" sometime ago and never revisited until today. You can't believe how often I have reflected about you, ever since we all became so orphaned by UMUC Europe. Well, my own separation (of course, not self-imposed) was in March 2014 when I concluded my very last course in Stuttgart. It was in the same building where Ron Taubitz, you and me found ourselves last time.

I hope you've been doing fine.

Carry on blessed!

*****

Hi Patrick,

How nice to hear from you!  I, too, left UMUC in 2014.  Retired in August, having taught 40 years, and that was enough. 

It was hard to tell who was more delighted about my retirement -- me or my wife.  I am sorry to say, before Spring was over I lost her. The immediate cause was an embolism. The underlying cause was a brain tumor.

Orphaned in Europe is right.  But we persevere, don't we?

All the best to you and your family,

Warren

*****

Dear Warren, hi there again!

Very sorry to hear about your loss. I count it as somewhat comforting that it occurred after your formal retirement from UMUC. At least it enabled you, I assume, to devote a certain degree of precious time with her together, prior to the inevitable departure. May she rest in peace. [………]

*****

Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your kind words.  In truth, there's never enough precious time, no matter how much time you spend together.  Shortly after we got married, a sociologist, waxing eloquent, insisted that marriages are doomed to failure if the couple come from different cultures, speak different languages, and observe different faiths.  At least once a year, we jokingly asked, "Is it time yet?"  It never was time.  In the hospital, a priest administered the last rites.  At her funeral, a minister my wife picked out had the last words. Prominent in his words were those of a Muslim who celebrated Thanksgiving with us when he first came to America almost 50 years ago and remembered my wife as one of the kindest persons he ever met.

As for UMUC, I gambled and got a payout, and completely turned my back on teaching or, to nab the words of Chief Joseph, "I shall profess no more, forever." Naturally, with the Mad Hatters in the White House I vow gets broken from time to time in order to inspire informed opinions.  

[……………]

We are lucky, we survived a lifetime of teaching and kept our dignity.

All the best, my friend,

Warren

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May He Rest In Peace

Peter, hi there... Patrick Dua here. I'm a bit lost about you and I wonder why I don't remember you. I've been living near you at Boehl-Iggelheim since the early 1980s. When you have time, just send me email to: patrick.dua@gmail.com. Bye for now!

   I was busy teaching my course titled “Political Ideologies” at Sembach Airbase one evening when Fabian showed up late, unannounced, and took his seat at the back of the class. It was during my first week of teaching a full class with UMUC Europe. I had been scheduled by Rosemarie Anderson to teach the course in question. This occurred sometime around the early 1980s; so I had been a student myself not long before then. The administrative role of faculty observer played by Fabian was unknown to me beforehand. Neither did his apparent “intrusion” into my class disturb me in anyway. Like the students, I detected that the elderly gentleman was focused throughout on writing notes. The classroom featured a very relaxed atmosphere, since the students knew each other very well... Then it came time for break at 20:00. I was standing outside surrounded by students smoking and cracking jokes with one another. At one point, one female student interjected: Is the old guy also a student?

   I looked behind me and saw Fabian standing outside the door and looking towards my direction. I reckoned he needed to talk to me, so I walked over to him. He introduced himself to me and gave accounts of all the places he had been to and all the courses he had observed that week. He said he thought I was enthusiastic and felt very comfortable presenting my material to the class -- for which I thanked him. Fabian offered me several useful tips and advice, especially regarding how to engage and integrate the students more actively in the course flow. After the class resumed from the short break, Fabian kindly agreed to share his thoughts and insights with the class and left behind a profound impact before leaving. His brief – yet supportive - influence on me that evening remained a memorable encounter for me throughout my career with UMUC. It’s comforting to know that Fabian was blessed with such a long life. May his soul rest in peace.

(Patrick Dua)

I am deeply saddened to read about David's sudden call to eternity. I remember I heard the name a couple of times back then in his days in Heidelberg. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to meet him personally. My deepest sympathies go out to all his dear ones. May he rest in peace. 

    A sad aspect of our human existence is linked closely to the inevitable process of our aging. The more we age, the greater the frequency with which we lose members of our personal circles: family relationships, friends, professional colleagues, acquaintances, neighbors. Whichever way the path of fate, destiny or randomness ultimately take us, the bitter price we pay for this incremental loss is a feeling of loneliness, especially in advanced age.

   Three departed members of our ED family, including Paul Phillips, are set within the context of what I intend to narrate below.

   One late Friday afternoon in 1984/85, I found myself at the Heidelberg office to turn in my grades and also to meet Chris Mooney as arranged previously between us. He was preparing to leave Europe and return to the US for good.  Things turned out to have been more eventful by the fact that it was also the day on which I first met Paul Phillips and LeAnn Cragun. But before then, I was to play the role of inheritor and recipient of Chris Mooney’s surplus personal items. These consisted of books, identical copies of books, an assortment of travel bags, umbrellas, rain coats; quantities of European travel guides – I never understood why Chris seemed to have sensed a need to procure so many identical items; and then, there were various Catholic devotional objects: crucifixes, artworks with Catholic motifs, etc, etc, all of which became mine on that day.

   As he helped me to load these items into my car, it was all vintage Chris Mooney as always -- with his bedazzling eccentricities: hyper; super-hyper, and talkative like a waterfall; Brit-bashing, among other things, and splendidly entertaining; every sentence uttered, partly delivered – yes -  in Latin, carried a seed to move you to laughter and more tearful laughter. Well, anyone of you who remembers Chris Mooney with his tall and imposing stature definitely knows what I mean here. Chris Mooney was the kind of person whose sheer presence caused your dampened spirits or subdued mood to just evaporate in an instant. This, to say the least, was how I knew him personally.

   Next, the two of us enter the office building. We encounter LeAnn Cragun in the lobby by accident: “Hey LeAnn”, Chris rants, “this is my African cousin Patrick. He is Irish!” Almost instantly a gentle voice beamed from the first office on the right. It was that of Paul Phillips. “Good to meet you, Patrick.  I just heard Chris say that your birthday is the 17^th of March…”

This, by the way, was the last time I saw Chris Mooney.

   I was at the office again sometime in the course of the following term when I bumped into LeAnn at the photocopy machine. “Paul is looking for you”, she whispered. The first words of Paul thrown at my direction when I entered his office were characteristic; but this time the tone got me almost frozen: “Patrick, we’re going to make you rich”. After some hesitation I reckoned I needed additional details to move me to either applaud or express gratitude. In any case, what Paul meant was that he had assigned me to commute 210 kilometers to teach a morning class at Nuernberg – Schwabach. It was to be one of those so-called circuit rider courses, of limited duration, and hence no conventional class lasting eight weeks. Apparently Paul’s peculiar approach to announcing his plan to me was based on some degree of doubt on his part as to whether I was prepared to accept the assignment. On account of the distance, he seemed to think that his proposition amounted to a task bordering on outrage rather than a pleasant surprise.

   True, I had become used for some time to making long trips to teach. But such assignments were usually to handle weekend seminars, usually. offered by Monika Zwink, and  hosted sometimes at far more distant locations. However, as the case used to be with seminars, one could stay overnight and return home Sunday evenings to pursue other assignments during the following week. I had heard that not all freelancers like me were prepared to travel too far to teach.  Personally, long commutes were never an issue for me. However, a class assignment as far away as Nuernberg-Schwabach was to be a first for me.

   Paul reacted ever more cheerfully when he became assured that I had no reservations about my next term assignment. On the contrary; I looked forward to this unique assignment with adventurous spirit and positive anticipation. “By the time I get to Schwabach to start my class, I sure would be so powered out already from driving that I might need some of Chris Mooney’s pills”, I joked with Paul.

   Indeed, there were some tellingly encouraging reasons as well for my embrace of this new challenge: To begin with, I had just purchased the first (in a total series of four by 2014) of my Mazda RX-7 rotary-engine car. I had bought the car from our colleague Gerrold Bagley who had been teaching business courses in the Ramstein-Baumholder ED-Center areas. I had completed the transaction with Bagley a few days before he was to leave on some kind of mission to Iran (which I reckoned to be somewhat strange, given that country’s revolution of 1979 and the messy relationship with the US that ensued. But Bagley was a convert to the Persian faith of Bahai, so I assumed he might have been a potentially favored guest in that part of the world). Anyway, upon inspecting the contents of the car’s dossier passed on to me by Bagley, I couldn’t believe my luck. Bagley had contracted repair works on the car with a Mazda dealer in Baumholder and paid a bill to the shocking tune of 3000 DM in the previous month. So, once I obtained the keys, I could feel, drive and laugh all the way home with the confidence that I now owned the most reliable piece of vehicle ever acquired by me in my entire life!

   Second, we are dealing in the accounts here with the period prior to 1990 and the fall of the iron curtain. The autobahn stretch from Heilbronn that I was to negotiate four times a week to my assignment at Nuernberg-Schwabach happened in those days to be one of the least congested in Germany – headed at its extremes towards Czechoslovakia and the East. For me, it was a very familiar route, having been used occasionally in my journeys to teach weekend seminars at Erlangen, Furth, Wildflecken, and Nuremberg, among other places. Compared to what started to gather momentum after 1989/90 in tune with the massive flight of Easterners to West Germany, it was a thoroughly stau-free autobahn for commuters at any given time before 1990. There was, in effect, no reason for me to doubt my ability to combine a morning class at Schwabach to other evening schedules elsewhere nearer home. At the end of the term, I remember Paul giving me a very firm handshake and congratulating me for ‘having survived’.

   These, then, are the circumstances within which I came to know Paul Phillips. Over the years until Paul and LeAnn left Heidelberg for the UK, both had become old friends whom I always sought out at faculty meetings and Commencements to chat with, exchange news, and photograph with my pocket camera. In later years, I recall that LeAnn and Paul talked often about a recurrent stomach ailment affecting Paul, albeit in terms that suggested that he was coping with it very well. As commented by others above, I also remember Paul as an empathetic gentleman effusing a great deal of warmth, cordiality and natural friendliness. Concealed behind his ebullient figure and calm demeanor was a man endowed with a winning combination of infectious humor and keen wit. Comfort can surely be taken in the knowledge that the good Lord graced him with so much longevity in the company of his dear ones.

   I joined this OMA platform in October of 2016. While browsing through the past postings one night, deep sadness overwhelmed me when I read behind the In Memory tab that LeAnn Cragun and Chris Mooney had passed away in January 2007 and December 2014 respectively. I now regret that I never asked LeAnn to explain to me why she always started to sing a Gaelic song I didn’t understand whenever she saw me. May this remarkable trio of our memories rest in perpetual peace.

(Patrick Dua)