You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2004.
Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Franklin on _Babylon 5_, has died suddenly and unexpectedly. That sucks. “Jonathan”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000124.html has the link, and a picture.
There may be a better way to be introduced to the “Black Rebel Motorcyle Club”:http://www.blackrebelmotorcycleclub.com/ than cruising at unsafe speeds on Route 12, down the center of Hatteras Island on a warm May night, with the windows open and not a person in the car unopposed to sticking their head out the window and hollering.
But if there is, I can’t imagine it.
“Bull sharks”:http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/cleucas.htm are highly aggressive and don’t mind shallow water one bit. They can even swim in fresh water for a time. I was obsessed with sharks when I was a kid, and read all that I could about them, especially one book that described a number of different species, with accompanying full-page color illustrations. One in particular — maybe it was the bull shark, I don’t recall — depicted a cross-section of a freshwater river in Madagascar. The top half of the page depicted two hapless native fisherman, and beneath them, a shark angled up out of the murky river water, ready to strike. Upon seeing that picture I rushed to find a world atlas so I could locate Madagascar and see how likely it would be for such a shark to make its way from there to Lake Michigan, where I’d swim from time to time. It was a long and arduous journey — around the Cape of Good Hope, up the coast of West Africa, and cutting across the Atlantic at some point. The shark couldn’t do so very far north because of the temperature (I checked), and it probably wouldn’t be able to hold its breath all the way across the ocean at a wider point to the St. Lawrence Seaway, and from there through the Sault Ste. Marie locks and eventually to the beach at Holland State Park. Probably. But I’d watch the Lake Michigan water with a suspicious eye, just the same.
In their battles against us, the sharks are losing. But they have the whole psychological-warfare part of the struggle sewn up. (They’re faring well when it comes to “propaganda”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000025.html, too.) They’ve got me beat, at any rate. I stood at the edge of the ocean yesterday, waves batting around my waist, and I couldn’t will myself to take a step further. This wasn’t entirely irrational, considering I’m in “Avon, North Carolina”:http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/04/shark.attacks/ at the moment. But still. I had to wait for my buddy Joe to arrive before I could plunge in without fear — on theory that there’d be someone to pull me out if a shark gnawed off my leg or something.
Odds-wise, even here, not going into the water out of shark-fear is like updating your will just because you’ll be flying on a plane soon. And yet I still couldn’t make myself take that step alone. What purpose does this intimidation serve? Surely if the sharks wanted more of us for food, it would be better to lay off the “ravenous lurker” image and encourage more twilight swims. They must be _working_ on something down there, beneath the waves. Something they don’t want us to see.
We may be winning, but the war is far from over.
The Polytropos clan is off to the Outer Banks for a week. Blogging opportunities will arise in direct proportion to the number of rainy days we have, but will be infrequent in any case. Try not to break anything while I’m away.
Unqualified Offerings had better be a “middling blog”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_05_16.html#005368, otherwise I don’t even want to think about what Polytropos is . . .
First, there were Birkenstocks. Well, probably not — I’m sure there was some sort of uber-hip sandal before that, but I wasn’t privy to it. I admired Birkenstocks in college, but didn’t get my own pair until 1994. Before that I made do with a $10 pair of something vaguely resembling Birks that I lovingly called my “Shadowstocks.” Even then, when I couldn’t afford sandal cool, I coveted sandal cool. And that’s really never changed.
What redeemed Birks from being merely a granola fashion statement or a gesture of allegiance to functional German design was that they actually were really comfortable. But their biggest obstacle — and I’m talking about the classic pair of Birks here, all cork and leather — is that water was hell on them, and they weren’t particularly rugged, so you couldn’t use them for a day at the beach or the lake. Indeed, Birks are best as winter sandals, on a frigid, snowless day, worn with really thick wool socks. (Sadly, the current Birkenstock web page is advertising the “Heidi Klum collection” — clearly, Birks as a brand have jumped the shark.)
I still own and cherish a pair of Birks, but sandal fashion has moved on. Sportier footwear came into vogue, and the place to buy it was (and is) REI. Sure, there are other outdoor stores that may sell similar things, but REI is a co-op, which gains it an unbeatable amount of sandal cool cachet. For the past six or seven summers I’ve been using my pair of Tevas which, at the time I bought them, were the height of sandal cool. They’re waterproof, they’re sleek, and they’re embroidered with an interlocking scorpion pattern. One big problem with Tevas, though, is that they absorb and even magnify foot odor. That was explained to me when I bought them, but at that time, when they were the “it” sandal, having to contend with the odor by soaking them regularly was a badge of honor. Now, of course, it’s just a pain in the butt, and besides, they’ve aged to a point when they’re no longer super-comfortable — and they were never anywhere as comfortable as my Birks in the first place.
So earlier this week I set out to REI to regain my sandal cool. And I thought that meant going there to buy a pair of Chacos. Suanna bought hers before we went to Thailand, and couldn’t praise them enough. Their gimmick is that the strap is one continuous piece, making them kind of funky to adjust, but very minimalist and light. I had envied her Chacos for a year and a half, and was good and ready to catch up with the times . . .
But Chacos are so 2002. The new big thang in sandals are Keens. Keens eschew the minimalist aesthetic and go so far as to put a big rubber toe in the front. They’re kind of ugly-looking, actually, but sturdy enough that, if you had to sprint away from a tiger, whether across the jungle floor or across concrete, they’d back you up. Plus, wearing them is like wearing a cushion of air. I can’t explain it, because they look big and clunky, but they feel great. I’ve walked on mine for about six miles so far and they keep getting better.
It seems that, with Keens, the pendulum has swung as far as it can go in the direction of functionality-as-fashion. Eventually, the non-sturdy-but-groovy-looking Birkenstocks, or something like them, will come back into vogue. Maybe when that time comes I’ll still have my old pair. Now that would be cool.
Jon Stewart gave the “commencement address”:http://web.wm.edu/news/index.php?id=3650 at William and Mary this year. And yes, it’s Jon-Stewart-good. Excerpt:
Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I . . . I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.
Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry.
I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize.
But here’s the good news. You fix this thing, you’re the next greatest generation, people. You do this — and I believe you can — you win this war on terror, and Tom Brokaw’s kissing your ass from here to Tikrit, let me tell ya. And even if you don’t, you’re not gonna have much trouble surpassing my generation. If you end up getting your picture taken next to a naked guy pile of enemy prisoners and don’t give the thumbs up you?ve outdid us.
We declared war on terror. We declared war on terror — it’s not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I’m sure we’ll take on that bastard ennui.
Hat tip to Joltin’ Joe.
It’s been another long haul since the last Liberia update, once again because there hasn’t been all that much to report. The country is rebuilding, slowly. The UN force remains there to oversee the disarmament of the warring factions. It’s not terribly exciting, but a far sight better than the chaos that preceded it. I argued at the time that this was a situation that merited international intervention, and I feel quite comfortable with that position in retrospect.
That said, yesterday there was a “riot in Monrovia”:http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=512239§ion=news instigated by former members of Charles Taylor’s army who claimed not to have been paid for weapons they’d already turned in. Several people were injured and one was killed. (A similar dispute over cash suspended the disarmament program for a while last year.) Ambiguities outnumber facts in this situation: Were the fighters actually unpaid or underpaid? If so, was it a result of mismanagement or corruption? If not, are the fighters just being uppity or are their actions part of a coordinated attempt at destabilization?
Who knows? But this is as bad as it’s been since Taylor was ousted, and it’s not near as bad as I thought it’d be. On Liberia’s future, I remain cautiously optimistic. Disarmament still has a long way to go: “about 26,000″:http://allafrica.com/stories/200405120851.html have turned in their weapons so far, out of anywhere from 38,000 to 60,000 total estimated former combatants. But most of those who remain live upcountry, not in the more heavily populated coastal cities. And in any case, the disarmament program is far less crucial to the country’s future than the delivery of aid and economic development, but since it’s the big UN operation it tends to get the press coverage.
Charles Taylor remains exiled in Calabar. I noted earlier that his stay there is looking a little less cozy than it was at first. Phase One of his exile involved barely-concealed activity to influence Liberian politics from afar. After being told to pipe down by President Obasanjo, Taylor entered Phase Two: stony silence. Last month, before sliding back into stony silence (or at least being ignored by the media), he briefly tried to enter Phase Three, “tearful pleading”:http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,,2-11-1447_1511817,00.html:
“My involvement in Sierra Leone was approved by Ecowas. This bizarre scenario (of his sponsoring war crimes in that country) was put together to get at Charles Taylor,” he told his Nigerian television interviewer . . . Taylor broke down in tears when the television interviewer asked him if he missed Liberia, saying: “I did not squander the wealth of my people. Mr Taylor did his best in Liberia.”
Friendly tip to CT: if you’re gonna go for the heartstrings, don’t refer to yourself in the third person all the time. It freaks people out. But hey, big props for “this bit”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3623449.stm . . .
The former president said he was writing a book, and added that he wanted to return to Liberia and set up a foundation for orphans, war wounded and gifted children.
. . . because nothing makes people forget all about corruption, brutality, and general misrule like helpin’ the kiddies!
Since I’ve been following this story relatively closely, I’m attuned to the slight misstatements and oversimplifications pervasive in media coverage. A classic example is this sentence from the BBC article cited above:
Mr Taylor, who relocated to Nigeria last August, said he felt “absolutely safe” — despite a reported $2m bounty on his head, and an Interpol warrant for his arrest.
Regular readers of Polytropos will be able to say it with me by now: _”It’s not a bounty!”_ Furthermore, the Red Notice put up by Interpol, while significant, is _not_ the same thing as a warrant for his arrest. Come on, people. It can’t be _that_ hard to keep the facts straight if _I_ can do it, sitting on my ass and using Google.
Now we come to the disturbing news, which, thankfully, is only tangentially related to Liberia.
Let’s say you’re an ex-KGB officer who’s become wealthy in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union as a weapons dealer and smuggler. We’ll call you — oh, I dunno — “Victor Bout”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,415125,00.html. You operated out of Belgium for a while, but left when the government there started looking into the shady activities of your vast fleet of planes. You found it must more hospitable in the United Arab Emirates, where you operated for a long time, though you reportedly live in Russia now.
You sold weapons to Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, but when the Taliban took over, you sold to them too. In 2000, Peter Hain of the UK Foreign Office called you Africa’s “leading merchant of death,” because of your work smuggling weapons into war-torn Angola and Sierra Leone. Between your dealings with the Taliban and with the illicit diamond trade in Liberia, you certainly have “connections with Al Qaeda”:http://www.ruudleeuw.com/air_cess_more.htm.[1] (“Here”:http://ciponline.org/financialflows/farahremarks.htm are some related comments by Douglas Farah on that point.)
So, when the UN finally catches up with you and wants to freeze your assets because of your involvement with Charles Taylor’s ousted regime, who do you turn to to make it go away?
Why, “the United States, of course!”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1083180541131&p=1012571727088
Yes, that’s right, the U.S. wants to keep Bout’s name off a list of those who are going to get hit with UN sanctions, because — wait for it — _he’s being used in Iraq_. He’s a freakin’ contractor.
Contracting with South African mercenaries: objectionable. Contracting with people with known Al Qaeda links: completely fucking nuts.
And now the caveats: the story’s new, it hasn’t even broke stateside yet, there could be some other, perfectly innocent reason for wanting to protect Bout. Besides, Saddam contracted with far worse folks than him. I’ll be waiting for the facts to surface that make this less awful-sounding than it is now. But I’m not holding my breath.
(Note: After working on all this I discovered that, not surprisingly, “Kathryn Cramer”:http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000569.html wrote about Victor Bout yesterday. Check her site out for some more interesting/depressing links and quotes.)
UPDATE: Suanna’s first comment on hearing the stuff about Bout: “I guess that makes the U.S. a country that consorts with those who support terrorists.” And her second: “If the guy had an Arab name he’d be sitting in Guantanamo right now.” Yup.
UPDATE: It looks like, thanks to the first Financial Times article, the U.S. is “backpedalling on this one”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1084907669559. Armitage: “As far as I’m concerned [Bout] ought to be on any asset freeze list and anything else you can do it him.” I’ll bet it wasn’t State that was trying to protect him in the first place, though. Anyway, thank God for media scrutiny.
fn1. This text is part of a “web page about Victor Bout”:http://www.ruudleeuw.com/vbout00.htm maintained by an aviation enthusiast named Ruud Leuw. Leuw has copied the full text of a number of news articles onto his site, some of which are no longer available online. From the ones that are it appears that the texts have been copied intact, but nevertheless, caveat lector. There’s much more good reading about Bout on the site — I’m only scratching the surface here.
It starts — well, not _innocently_ enough, but at least at a place that is arguably problematic but not blatantly reprehensible. “According to Sy Hersh”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact, Rumsfeld was up in arms about the fact that U.S. military units would have to phone home to get clearance from a _lawyer_ before hitting targets in Afghanistan — a practice that apparently led to some golden opportunities being missed. So he had Stephen Cambone, his Undersecretary for Intelligence, set up a special-access program: a covert op, basically, that was authorized to act without hesitation and to take extreme measures (including things like the sexual humiliation of prisoners) in order to help capture or kill the most dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists.
So what we have here is the power to commit awful acts given to a small number of people, in extraordinary circumstances, and in secret. I think there’s a healthy debate to be had about whether such power should ever be granted at all, but I think we can agree that, as far as real-life situations go, capturing Bin Laden is one of those cases where it may be warranted, if at all.
But after a couple years the same power-to-abuse is granted, under the auspices of the same program, not to some Special Forces guys working against Al Qaeda, but to Army reservists overseeing a hellhole prison full mostly, according to the ICRC, of people pulled in off the street who had nothing to do with the Iraqi insurgency and which, we should never forget to mention, have nothing whatsoever to do with Al Qaeda.
In the healthy debate about whether this sort of abuse and torture is _ever_ allowable, I can think of no stronger argument for the con side than the current situation: the mandate for such power, once granted, has a way of expanding on its own.
The following rant is brought to you, tangentially, by “this Slate article”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2100008 about the TV show Friends. Chris Suellentrop argues that it’s a mistake to see the show as the “last great situation comedy” because it’s not even a sitcom, but rather a “soapcom”: “a soap opera masquerading as a situation comedy.” He points out that the show features multiple-episode story arcs that reward and even demand continuous attention to understand what’s going on: a trait anathema to traditional sitcom rules. Along the way he makes a very good point:
Somewhere along the way, TV drama and TV comedy switched places. It’s fairer to call shows like Law & Order and CSI “sitdramas” than it is to call Friends a sitcom. Law & Order’s syndicated success hinges on the tidiness of each episode. You can shuffle them all together and deal them out in any order you like, and viewers won’t even notice. But if you shuffled episodes from Friends’ 10 seasons and aired them in random order, you wouldn’t have the slightest bit of continuity from show to show.
He’s perfectly right as far as it goes, but (and here’s the rant) why must soap operas always be invoked whenever referring to TV shows with plot continuity? It irks me here the same way it irked me to hear people critical of “Babylon 5″:http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html refer to it as “a soap opera in space.” It’s true that B5 featured a continuous story, and that soap operas do the same, but that’s as far as the similarity goes. B5′s storyline was an actual _plot_, heading for an ending, within each season and across them. It wasn’t the first show to do this (I’m curious to hear of examples that predate “The Prisoner”:http://www.the-prisoner-6.freeserve.co.uk/), but was imitated quickly by shows like Buffy and Angel, and now by more mainstream shows like 24 and Alias.
By contrast, the storylines of soap operas are constantly unfolding but never-ending. Short-term twists and turns try to maintain the audience’s interest, but in the long-term there’s no plot development, just more of the same. ER follows this model, as did The X-Files, which disingenuously posed as a show-with-a-plot even though it was just one long, and ultimately annoying, tease.
The long-term unfolding story is an obvious match for television; it’s the way to achieve a sweeping, deep effect, like that of a novel, on the screen, something a two- or even three-hour film can never hope to do. There are plenty of shows that do this, and they deserve better than to be compared merely to soap operas.
