Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

I never met John Updike, except in print.
In the February 5, 1996 editions of The New Yorker, he wrote this of my work:

“Last summer the dying Congolese novelist, playwright and poet told the Times correspondent, Howard French, “Africa is the only continent left that has not found its way. We have this incredible wealth, of resources and spirit, but outsiders like France are just robbing us, while blessing our dictators.”

Tansi made this statement in the remote village of Foufoundou, in his native African state of Congo, where he had found remission from the symptoms of aids by way of mixture of herbal medicines and incantations that mixed “African traditional healing and Christian evangelism.” Tansi told his interviewer, “I had been to hospitals in Brazzaville and Paris, but they had been unable to do anything for me. It wasn’t until I came here, following the voice of a prophet that my condition really began to change. I should have come long ago.” But his native herbal concoctions had not helped Tansi’s wife, Pierrette, who, lying emaciated and feeble on a mat, claimed they had made her mouth so sore that she could eat nothing but oranges. Two weeks later, both she and Tansi were dead.”

He was 47 and widely considered the leading writer of Central Africa. His miserable end betokens the misery of Africa, a continent beset by AIDS, famine, poverty, corruption, tyranny and genocidal massacre…” (the article continues at some length.)

There was an honor, naturally, in having one’s work mentioned by Updike. But there was something more, too, an odd coming together in this experience of two of the writers on Africa whose fiction had most affected me: Updike and Tansi. More about Tansi can be found on this site. As for Updike, his novel, The Coup, is not particularly well appreciated, but its a jewel of perception, of wicked humor and of observation — both of an imagined Africa, if that’s possible, and of the United States, whose provincialism, tawdriness and vacuous commercialism, the author lampoons without mercy.

Both of the offerings below come most highly recommended.

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Copyright N+1

The Complete Centerfolds is a coffee-table book compiling every Playboy centerfold published from the magazine’s inception in 1953 until 2007. Six short essays preface the decades, but there is no other text. As you might expect, the pleasures of the book are instant and visual. My favorite Playboy centerfold is Miss September 1983, dressed for a college football game in striped socks and a tartan scarf. She has a flask, a fuzzy wool cap, and a team pennant. Her neo-Gothic surroundings are meant, I think, to evoke Yale. A single branch of ivy cascades next to her, and a textbook lies abandoned at her feet. She is naked. It sounds funny in writing, but somehow there’s nothing funny about the photograph, or about any of the photographs in The Complete Centerfolds. Is laughter an anti-aphrodisiac?

The first thing that strike the casual reader is the anatomical variety among bunnies. Nipples, for one thing. Some are as big as cupcakes, others are the size of a penny. They are occasionally erect and come in a range of colors as varied as drugstore lipsticks. Pubic hair is another delight to behold, appearing first in 1971 and thriving until 1997. Gauzy coronas of pubic hair, technicolor dreampubes of every shade. You forget how assertive a healthy growth of hair can look. It comes as a pleasant shock in the midst of a creamy-smooth expanse.

Pubic hair diminishes as the nineties draw to a close. Neat triangles turn to Band Aid-sized strips, which become little Hitler mustaches or nothing at all. The modern crotch is a bit prim, a bit less forthright. You’d think that depilation would lend a youthful look to the genitals but it has the opposite effect instead, making the girls look older and slightly jaded. (Intimate grooming signals forethought.) The youthful quality of the early centerfolds disappears.

A 1956 memo to Playboy photographers listed Hefner’s criteria for the centerfolds. The model must be in a natural setting engaged in some activity “like reading, writing, mixing a drink.” She should have a “healthy, intelligent, American look—a young lady that looks like she might be a very efficient secretary or an undergrad at Vassar.” Many centerfolds feature the implied presence of a man: a flash of trouser leg in the corner, a pipe left on a table. These props transform the pinups into seduction scenarios. Their premise is simple: by identifying with the absent man, a viewer can enter the scene.

The centerfold’s signature is what we might call the “Playboy aesthetic”—something responsible both for Playboy’s long run of success and its schmaltziness. As Hefner put it in a letter to Russ Meyer (director of Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill!), the ideal centerfold is one in which “a situation is suggested, the presence of someone not in the picture.” The goal was to transform “a straight pinup into an intimate interlude, something personal and special.” Playboy readers are meant to be participants, not voyeurs. Hefner’s vision of American sexuality was a distinctly pasteurized one—sex cleansed of its ugly (and often exciting) power plays. “Clean sex,” he insisted, “has greater appeal than tawdry sex.” Strippers, threesomes and S&M had no place in his magazine. The Playboy centerfold was a world away from the European ideal of a sexually-sophisticated temptress. Hefner’s girls were always girls, first of all, or bunnies— not women. There was no knowing gleam in a centerfold’s eye.

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Copyright The New York Times

One cold afternoon last fall I met Yu Hua at the state-run Friendship Hotel in Beijing. Cheerfully, he described to me the incipient international fame of his most recent novel, “Brothers,” one of China’s biggest-selling literary works. He had just returned from Hong Kong, where the novel was short-listed for the Man Asian Prize; he was leaving soon for Paris to receive an award for the book, which had just been translated into French. With the breezy insouciance that unbroken success creates, Yu then began to recount a somewhat irreverent memory of Mao Zedong’s death.

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Photograph by Gueorgui Pinkhassov/magnumphotos.com
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Photograph by Gueorgui Pinkhassov/magnumphotos.com
Though nearly 50, Yu, who wears his hair short and spiky, looks relatively young. He speaks in emphatic bursts, his face often flushing red, and he is quick to laugh. It was, in fact, his boisterous laugh that almost got him into trouble on the morning of the solemn announcement of Mao’s death. Responding to orders that blared out from loudspeakers, he assembled with hundreds of other students in the main hall of his small-town high school. “Funereal music was played, and then we had to hear the long list of titles that preceded Mao’s name, ‘Chairman,’ ‘Beloved Leader,’ ‘Great helmsman … ,’ ” Yu recalled. “Everyone loved Chairman Mao, of course, so when his name was finally announced, everyone burst into tears. I started crying, too, but one person crying is a sad sight; more than a thousand people crying together, the sound echoing, turns into a funny spectacle, so I began to laugh. My body shook with my effort to control my laughter while I bent over the chair in front of me. The class leader later told me, admiringly, ‘Yu Hua, you were crying so fervently!’ ”

He paused, and then jumped 13 years to a memory of another momentous — and more traumatic — event in China’s modern history. In the spring of 1989, when tens of thousands of protesters filled Tiananmen Square, Yu was living in Beijing, partaking of the cultural excitement and political hopefulness of post-Mao China. Already a major figure in the city’s artistic avant garde, Yu biked every day to Tiananmen Square to express solidarity with the student protesters.

As Yu described the widespread civilian support for the students, a note of passion entered his voice, and the menu he had elegantly snagged off a passing waiter lay open and unread in his lap. “The word ‘people’ was much used in the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “It is a very loaded term in China, it is used a lot, but until the mass protests in 1989 I did not realize what the word meant.”

His voice grew louder as he recalled the bloody suppression and aftermath of the protests. I became nervous. Yu, a short, thickset man with bulging eyes, could easily pass unnoticed in a crowd of Chinese peasants and workers, but he does not exactly strive for self-effacement. We were sitting in the corner of the hotel lobby, partly concealed by a large pillar and surrounded by a thick fog of cigarette smoke. Yu, a restless chain smoker, insists on ignoring China’s new ban on smoking in public places.

The hotel was full that day of young executives from nearby I.T. offices , any one of whom might have recognized Yu, who is frequently mentioned as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though official repression of the memory of Tiananmen has ensured that few young Chinese know much about the struggles for democracy waged in the 1980s, cybersavvy youth of the kind we were surrounded by are still likely to take a sternly nationalistic line with a Chinese writer or intellectual criticizing the events of June 1989 to a foreigner. Indeed, as Yu spoke, a trendily dressed young woman looked up from the glowing screen of her laptop to squint at him.

Yu seemed totally oblivious to potential eavesdroppers. His face was red as he came to end of his memory of 1989. Turning to me, he said: “Sorry to take off like that. But this was a big turning point for all of us. After June 1989 people in China lost interest in politics. In 1992 Deng Xiaoping made his famous ‘Southern Tour,’ calling for faster market reforms, and the economy started to take off. The ideals of nation and socialism began to look empty. People became focused on making money.

“I, too, began to enjoy the fruits of capitalism,” he added, and laughed.

YYu was only partly joking. For someone who started out in China’s brief moment of counterculture in the 1980s as a writer of bleak, experimental and defiantly unsalable stories, Yu has gone on to receive an ample share of the fruits of capitalism. Published in two parts in 2005 and 2006, “Brothers,” which traces the fortunes of two stepbrothers from the Cultural Revolution to China’s no-less-frenzied Consumer Revolution, has sold more than a million copies in China, not counting the probably higher sales of innumerable pirated editions.

The novel, which will be published in an English translation later this month, may also prove to be China’s first successful export of literary fiction. Certainly, foreign readers will find in its sprawling, rambunctious narrative some of China’s most frenetic transformations and garish contradictions. “Brothers” strikes its characteristic tone with the very first scene, as Li Guang, a business tycoon, sits on his gold-plated toilet, dreaming of space travel even as he mourns the loss of all earthly relations. Li made his money from various entrepreneurial ventures, including hosting a beauty pageant for virgins and selling scrap metal and knockoff designer suits. A quick flashback to his small-town childhood shows him ogling the bottoms of women defecating in a public toilet. Similarly grotesque images proliferate over the next 600 pages as Yu describes, first, the extended trauma of the Cultural Revolution, during which Li and his stepbrother Song Gang witness Red Guards torturing Song Gang’s father to death, and then the moral wasteland of capitalist China, in which Song Gang is forced to surgically enlarge one of his breasts in order to sell breast-enlargement gels.

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor’s bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile’s trajectory back to an “enormous, stupid mistake” made 30 years ago.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with “Yassins,” primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.

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Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas.

Last Saturday, after 22 days of war, Israel announced a halt to the offensive. The assault was aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from falling on Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hailed a “determined and successful military operation.” More than 1,200 Palestinians had died. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.

Hamas responded the next day by lobbing five rockets towards the Israeli town of Sderot, a few miles down the road from Moshav Tekuma, the farming village where Mr. Cohen lives. Hamas then announced its own cease-fire.

Since then, Hamas leaders have emerged from hiding and reasserted their control over Gaza. Egyptian-mediated talks aimed at a more durable truce are expected to start this weekend. President Barack Obama said this week that lasting calm “requires more than a long cease-fire” and depends on Israel and a future Palestinian state “living side by side in peace and security.”

A look at Israel’s decades-long dealings with Palestinian radicals — including some little-known attempts to cooperate with the Islamists — reveals a catalog of unintended and often perilous consequences. Time and again, Israel’s efforts to find a pliant Palestinian partner that is both credible with Palestinians and willing to eschew violence, have backfired. Would-be partners have turned into foes or lost the support of their people.

Israel’s experience echoes that of the U.S., which, during the Cold War, looked to Islamists as a useful ally against communism. Anti-Soviet forces backed by America after Moscow’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan later mutated into al Qaeda.
[Hamas supporters in Gaza City after the cease-fire.] APA /Landov

Hamas supporters in Gaza City after the cease-fire.

At stake is the future of what used to be the British Mandate of Palestine, the biblical lands now comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was established, Israelis and Palestinians have each asserted claims over the same territory.

The Palestinian cause was for decades led by the PLO, which Israel regarded as a terrorist outfit and sought to crush until the 1990s, when the PLO dropped its vow to destroy the Jewish state. The PLO’s Palestinian rival, Hamas, led by Islamist militants, refused to recognize Israel and vowed to continue “resistance.” Hamas now controls Gaza, a crowded, impoverished sliver of land on the Mediterranean from which Israel pulled out troops and settlers in 2005.

When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and ’80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.

“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early ’90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.”

Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group’s recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. “Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons,” Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran.

Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military’s Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: “It is like saying: ‘I will kill all the mosquitoes.’ But then you get even worse insects that will kill you…You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda.”

When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza’s Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel — particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 — Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas’s appeal to ordinary Palestinians. The group ultimately trounced secular rivals, notably Fatah, in a 2006 election supported by Israel’s main ally, the U.S.

Now, one big fear in Israel and elsewhere is that while Hamas has been hammered hard, the war might have boosted the group’s popular appeal. Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas administration in Gaza, came out of hiding last Sunday to declare that “God has granted us a great victory.”

Most damaged from the war, say many Palestinians, is Fatah, now Israel’s principal negotiating partner. “Everyone is praising the resistance and thinks that Fatah is not part of it,” says Baker Abu-Baker, a longtime Fatah supporter and author of a book on Hamas.
A Lack of Devotion

Hamas traces its roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group set up in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood believed that the woes of the Arab world spring from a lack of Islamic devotion. Its slogan: “Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution.” Its philosophy today underpins modern, and often militantly intolerant, political Islam from Algeria to Indonesia.

After the 1948 establishment of Israel, the Brotherhood recruited a few followers in Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and elsewhere, but secular activists came to dominate the Palestinian nationalist movement.

At the time, Gaza was ruled by Egypt. The country’s then-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a secular nationalist who brutally repressed the Brotherhood. In 1967, Nasser suffered a crushing defeat when Israel triumphed in the six-day war. Israel took control of Gaza and also the West Bank.

“We were all stunned,” says Palestinian writer and Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi. He was at school at the time in Kuwait and says he became close to a classmate named Khaled Mashaal, now Hamas’s Damascus-based political chief. “The Arab defeat provided the Brotherhood with a big opportunity,” says Mr. Tamimi.

In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory’s previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people world-wide.

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A poster of the late Sheikh Yassin hangs near a building destroyed by the Israeli assault on Gaza.
Heidi Levine/Sipa Press for The Wall Street Journal

A poster of the late Sheikh Yassin hangs near a building destroyed by the Israeli assault on Gaza.
A poster of the late Sheikh Yassin hangs near a building destroyed by the Israeli assault on Gaza.
A poster of the late Sheikh Yassin hangs near a building destroyed by the Israeli assault on Gaza.

The Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin, was free to spread its message openly. In addition to launching various charity projects, Sheikh Yassin collected money to reprint the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian member of the Brotherhood who, before his execution by President Nasser, advocated global jihad. He is now seen as one of the founding ideologues of militant political Islam.

Mr. Cohen, who worked at the time for the Israeli government’s religious affairs department in Gaza, says he began to hear disturbing reports in the mid-1970s about Sheikh Yassin from traditional Islamic clerics. He says they warned that the sheikh had no formal Islamic training and was ultimately more interested in politics than faith. “They said, ‘Keep away from Yassin. He is a big danger,’” recalls Mr. Cohen.

Instead, Israel’s military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the recent war…

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Copyright The New York Times

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
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While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”

Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled, unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and clarified the location of the clitoris.

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Jackie McLean in all his glory. This is Jazz! The best of the early ’60s, that is. Jackie searching for a third way, between way, way out and mainstream hard bop fronts an amazing band, most notably the very young and extra Tony Williams on percussion, and Bobby Hutcherson on vibes. Saturday and Sunday, and Ghost town are my two favorite cuts. Tony’s drumming on the haunting, laconic opening, Jackie’s extended blowing on the alto sax, and Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes work are some of the finest work I know on these instruments.

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Copyright The New York Post

Friday, January 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

One White House official confirmed the comment but said he was simply trying to make a larger point about bipartisan efforts.

“There are big things that unify Republicans and Democrats,” the official said. “We shouldn’t let partisan politics derail what are very important things that need to get done.”

That wasn’t Obama’s only jab at Republicans today.

While discussing the stimulus package with top lawmakers in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, President Obama shot down a critic with a simple message.

“I won,” he said, according to aides who were briefed on the meeting. “I will trump you on that.”

The response was to the objection by Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to the president’s proposal to increase benefits for low-income workers who don’t owe federal income taxes.

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Copyright Pantheon Books

This striking passage is from the first chapter of Mamdani’s forthcoming book.

War may be serious business, but you never know it from the casual manner in which African wars tend to be reported in the Western media. Africa is usually the entry point for a novice reporter on the international desk, a learning laboratory where he or she is expected to gain experience. Reporting from Africa is a low-risk job: Not only are mistakes expected and tolerated, but often they are not even noticed. When it comes to mainstream media, there are no Africa specialists.

As a rule African tragedies happen in isolation and silence, under the cover of night. This was true of the Angolan war, which ended in 2002, and it remains true of the continuing wars in eastern Congo. When corporate media does focus on Africa, it seeks the dramatic, which is why media silence on Africa is often punctuated by high drama and why the reportage on African wars is more superficial than in-depth. The same media that downplays the specificity of each African war is often interested in covering only war, thereby continually misrepresenting the African continent. Without regard to context, war is presented as the camera sees it, as a contest between brutes. No wonder those who rely on the media for their knowledge of Africa come to think of Africans as particularly given to fighting over no discernible issue and why the standard remedy for internal conflicts in Africa is not to focus on issues but to get adversaries to “reconcile,” regardless of the issues involved.

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Copyright Slate

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Copyright The Daily Telegraph

China Daily, the official English-language newspaper used to signal the Communist Party’s views to the outside world, said President Bush had taken a “wrecking-ball” to world affairs.
Its stinging rebuke was in marked contrast to previous commentary by Party advisers which stressed President Bush’s successes in improving ties with Beijing.
The comments, in the paper’s main editorial, went on to express scepticism for President Obama’s vision of remaking America.
“The US leaders have never been shy of talking about their country’s ambition to be the leader of the world,” it said, sarcastically. “For them, it is a divinely granted destiny no matter what other nations think.”
It said more was required than just the “goodwill” Mr Obama might generate around the world.
The financial crisis would limit his power to act, put strains on overseas alliances and lead to clashes with other countries’ interests, it said. He would most probably fail to win wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, broker peace in the Middle East, prevent Iran building a nuclear programme, or stabilise African countries.
“The realities on the ground are more complex than presented by Obama,” it concluded.
The new hard line may reflect individual embarrassment by China Daily, the only major state media not to censor Mr Obama’s speech yesterday. In fact, it carried the comments from his inaugural address saying that regimes which crush dissent are “on the wrong side of history” on its front page.
Yet China also sees current American weakness, due to the financial crisis and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, as an opportunity for promoting its different approach to both internal governance and external relations on the world stage.
It has been effusive in its praise for President Bush’s conciliatory stance towards Beijing - and his insistence on attending the opening ceremony of the Olympics last year, despite calls for a boycott.
But it clearly felt its basic dislike of American interventionist policies be restated. “The world was holding its breath awaiting the end of President George W. Bush’s wrecking-ball approach to world affairs,” it said.
The paper also carried an aggressive commentary denouncing Henry Paulson, the outgoing treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, for suggesting that China might be partially responsible for the financial crisis for allowing savings to rise and consumption to fall.
“These remarks exhibit the obvious intention of the top US financial authorities to shirk their responsibilities for poor financial performances and shift domestic dissatisfactions to other countries,” wrote Shen Dingli, an international relations professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University who also advises the government.
Only the day before, the same newspaper said the financial crisis would draw America and China closer together.
Most popular newspapers in China have reacted more positively to President Obama. One website went so far as to portray him as Superman in a cartoon - albeit a Superman whose Chinese girlfriend refuses to lend him more money until he has learned to be more prudent with his finances.
The Chinese government has come under much criticism for investing so much of its foreign exchange reserves in lending to the US government - a policy it does not like but which it is forced to follow to avoid a too rapid appreciation of its own currency.
Individual internet commentators mixed admiration for President Obama and America’s values with some hostility to what were taken as references to China - in particular his claim that America had “faced down” communism and fascism.
“Obama is such a brainless country bumpkin,” wrote one, on the popular Sina.com. “It is already the 21th century and he still connects fascism with communism. This is a true failure of the USA.”
“No matter how attractive Obama’s personality is, the USA is still our enemy,” wrote “Son of China”. “What the American people can do, we can do as well.”
But others criticised the decision by state media to censor the speech, and compared President Obama favourably to their own leaders. “When will China have such a young and energetic top leader who will give us such real speeches, instead of making speeches which feels like they are a thousand miles away?” wrote ‘literate person’.

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Copyright The Washington Post

January 22, 2009

As you settle into the Oval Office, Mr. President, may I offer a suggestion? Please do not try to put Afghanistan aright with the U.S. military. To send our troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan would be a near-perfect example of going from the frying pan into the fire. There is reason to believe some of our top military commanders privately share this view. And so does a broad and growing swath of your party and your supporters.

True, the United States is the world’s greatest power — but so was the British Empire a century ago when it tried to pacify the warlords and tribes of Afghanistan, only to be forced out after excruciating losses. For that matter, the Soviet Union was also a superpower when it poured some 100,000 troops into Afghanistan in 1979. They limped home, broken and defeated, a decade later, having helped pave the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is logical to conclude that our massive military dominance and supposedly good motives should let us work our will in Afghanistan. But logic does not always prevail in South Asia. With belligerent Afghan warlords sitting atop each mountain glowering at one another, the one factor that could unite them is the invasion of their country by a foreign power, whether British, Russian or American.
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I have believed for some time that military power is no solution to terrorism. The hatred of U.S. policies in the Middle East — our occupation of Iraq, our backing for repressive regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our support of Israel — that drives the terrorist impulse against us would better be resolved by ending our military presence throughout the arc of conflict. This means a prudent, carefully directed withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere. We also need to close down the imposing U.S. military bases in this section of the globe, which do so little to expand our security and so much to stoke local resentment.

We cannot evade this reckoning. The British thought they could extend their control over Iraq even while pulling out their ground forces by creating a string of bases in remote parts of the country, away from the observation of most Iraqis. It didn’t work. No people that desires independence and self-determination wishes to have another nation’s military bases in its country. In 1776, remember, 13 little colonies drove the mighty British Empire from American soil.

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Monk comes in many flavors, almost all of them great. My favorite is solo - all alone. This album deserves pride of place any Monk collection. It’s pure, distilled genius. The songs ring with the clarity and cleanliness of meditations. There is nothing wasted here. Not a note. Not a thought. Not a motion.

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Copyright Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech has a little twist in translations available on some Chinese websites where his references to communism and dissent have been cut.
“Recall that earlier generations faced down communism and fascism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions,” Obama said in his 18-minute inauguration address on Tuesday.
“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
In the translations available on top Chinese portals Sina, Sohu, the word “communism” is omitted and the paragraph on dissent was gone.
Another widely viewed portal, Netease, cut the paragraph in its entirety, prompting one Canada-based Chinese to post it in English in the comments section, with the remark “Hahaha, communism and fascism.”
The paragraph mentioning dissent was included in the Netease version, and was widely praised by Chinese posting comments.
The full speech appeared on the website of Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based station that is branding its website as a source for news, and in English on the China Daily state newspaper website.
Communist China has shut more than 200 websites in recent days for “vulgar” content, a move seen by many as another step in its battle to stifle dissent in a year of sensitive anniversaries, including the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

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Copyright Gawker

White America is under siege! In like 40 years they’ll be a minority (though still with the majority of the money probably) but they are already being oppressed!

The latest offense? Jodi Kantor’s New York Times story on how multi-culti our new First Family is, what with being Kenyan and Indonesian and Kansan and the first lady is descended from slaves. But how is this an offense against Real American Whiteness? Well Obama invited his aunt to the party for his inauguration, and she is an illegal immigrant! Noted non-white defender of whiteness Michelle Malkin is on the case!

The right-wingers untouched by yesterday’s festivities (and to be fair, plenty of them were touched—Pat Buchanan, no racial progressive, was almost glowing after Obama’s speech last night) and stories about his non-presidential familial circumstances are, of course, not racist at all, ever, and they have lots of black friends, but they just don’t care for all this liberal white crowing about “diversity” as if that was some sort of noteworthy and virtuous thing.

Jay Nordlinger, for example, hated that speech because it was so mean to Bush, and therefore it was insulting to every white person who voted for Bush. BUT: “Speaking quite personally, I have never been an Obama-hater. I have never been much of an Obama disliker!” (This coming on the heels of his complaining about “ethno-racial variety”, a bizarre phrase.)

Everyone’s dander is up already, because The Atlantic wrote a big story on The End of Whiteness, which is about how it’s more worthwhile to market shit to people based on self-selected non-racial group identities than just “to whites” and “to ethnics.”

Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City. Within five years, there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time … [These immigrants] are energizing our culture and broadening our vision of the world. They are renewing our most basic values and reminding us all of what it truly means to be American.

Not everyone was so enthused. Clinton’s remarks caught the attention of another anxious Buchanan—Pat Buchanan, the conservative thinker. Revisiting the president’s speech in his 2001 book, The Death of the West, Buchanan wrote: “Mr. Clinton assured us that it will be a better America when we are all minorities and realize true ‘diversity.’ Well, those students [at Portland State] are going to find out, for they will spend their golden years in a Third World America.”

Hah. Pat was right, but not for the reason he thought he would be right, at all!

As “View From the Right explained, The Atlantic just published the piece because liberals want White People to be in the minority, and not because that is actually a “foregone conclusion” based on all available data. Why is the left consumed with the end of ‘White America’ asks some other joker, who then plays the always-fun “what if this had been written about BLACK PEOPLE I bet I’d get in trouble!” game.

Sorry, White People! You’ll just have to settle for whomever will probably be president after Obama!

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Posted at 10:09 PM · Comments (0)

Frank describes very well the Washington of my childhood, along with many of its implications. The only difference in perspective is that I grew up very much of the black Washington that was invisible to the people of his world.

Copyright The New York Times

I cannot testify to what black Americans feel as our nation celebrates the inauguration of our first African-American president. But I can speak for myself, as a white American who grew up in the segregated nation’s capital of the 1960s. Barack Obama’s day is one that I never thought would come, and one that I still can’t quite believe is here.
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Last week I joined a group of journalists at an off-the-record conversation with the president-elect, a sort of preview of the administration’s coming attractions. But as I walked some desolate downtown blocks to the standard-issue federal office building serving as transition headquarters, ghosts of the past mingled with hopes for the future. The contrast between the unemployed men on Washington’s frigid streets and the buzzing executive-branch bees inside was, for me, as old as time.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy’s, I remember vividly. Even an 11-year-old could see that the sleepy Southern town of the Eisenhower era was waking up, electrified by youth, glamour and the prospect of change.

But some of that change I didn’t then understand. J.F.K.’s arrival coincided with Washington’s emergence as the first American city with a black majority. Many whites responded by fleeing to the suburbs. My parents did the opposite, moving our family from the enclave of Montgomery County, Md., into the city as I was about to enter the fifth grade.

Our new neighborhood included the Sidwell Friends School. My mother, a public school teacher, decreed that her children would instead enroll in the public system that had been desegregated a half-dozen years earlier, after Brown v. Board of Education. In reality de facto segregation remained in place. Though a few African-Americans and embassy Africans provided the window dressing of “integration,” my mostly white elementary, junior high and high schools had roughly the same diversity as, say, today’s G.O.P.

I wish I could say we were all outraged at this apartheid. But we were kids — privileged kids at that — and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals.

Gradually we would learn more — from our parents and teachers, from televised incidents of violent racial confrontations far away, and from odd cultural phenomena like the 1961 best seller “Black Like Me.” In that book, a white novelist darkened his skin for undercover travels through deepest Dixie, whose bigotry he then described in morbid firsthand detail to shocked adolescents like me.

Surely such horrific injustices could not occur in our nation’s capital.

But as an unintended consequence of Washington’s particular brand of Jim Crow, white public school students got a tiny taste of what racially mandated second-class citizenship could mean. In those days, the city didn’t even have the bastardized form of “self-government” it has now; it was run as a plantation by Congressional District panels led by racist white Southerners (then Democrats). These overseers didn’t want to lavish money on an overwhelmingly black school system, and they didn’t. By the early 1960s, per-student spending in Washington was less than that of any state, impoverished West Virginia and Mississippi included.

If Washington’s white schools received a larger share of that meager budget, as they no doubt did, it was still obvious that our teachers had far fewer resources than their suburban and private school counterparts. Extracurricular activities could be curtailed by the costs of light and heat. The curriculum was also abridged, lest anyone get too agitated by America’s racial inequities. In my history class, the Civil War was downsized to a passing speed bump. In English, we read “Tom Sawyer,” not “Huckleberry Finn.”

Now that we were teenagers, we had both the curiosity and mobility to investigate the strangely undemocratic city that dealt us this hand. In the words of Constance McLaughlin Green, a Pulitzer Prize-winning urban historian, the District’s black population had long occupied “a secret city all but unknown to the white world round about.” We wanted in on the secrets.

There was so much we didn’t know, so much Americans still don’t know. Take the Lincoln Memorial, to which the Obama family paid so poignant a nocturnal visit this month. If you look up coverage of the memorial’s 1922 dedication ceremonies in The Times, you can read of President Harding’s forceful oration commemorating the demise of slavery. You also learn that Dr. Robert R. Moton, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, was invited to pay tribute to Lincoln “in the name of 12,000,000 Negroes.”

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Copyright The Root

Blackness is fast moving to the center of the world’s psyche. For proof, look no further than last month’s crowning of a binational and biracial Miss France 2009. Chloe Mortaud’s selection as the face of French beauty and elegance has so few precedents that the French media have named her, perhaps cheaply, “Miss Obama.”

In one symbolic photo circulating on the Web, Mortaud, whose mother is African-American and whose father is French, is being kissed on either cheek by the two runners-up. The image’s symmetry communicates the bleak uniformity of traditional universalizing in French culture. The two runners-up look like pasty twins. Mortaud bursts through with a bit of brown and a confident smile, announcing that multicultural pluralism has arrived.

The photo represents a new vogue that blackness is experiencing around the world. “Black is the new America,” as Pakistani blogger Asad Haider put it. Once a generic signifier of outsideness, the concept of blackness may be slowly changing to represent a much desired centrality.

Although she is a media darling, not everyone is happy about the breakthrough. Marine Beaury, the first attendent to Mortaud’s regional crown, has contested her loss in court. Around the Web, some French commentators have complained that Mortaud is not pretty.

The very discussion of Mortaud’s worthiness represents an advance in the way the French deal with race. The enduring myth of a colorblind France has obscured the relative invisibility of non-white French people in France’s public life. The French government does not keep statistics on race. The official position is that there are no differences among the races—therefore, there is no reason to keep an account of it. That means disparities among racial groups cannot be quantified. However, a trip to an impoverished banlieue (suburb) of Paris or Marseille, where “race riots” in neighborhoods inhabited by large numbers of African and Arab immigrants have made world headlines, shows a qualitative difference.

Thanks in part to the Obama effect, French blacks who have traditionally been divided by designations like Caribbean, African or mixed ancestry, have started to make claims on transnational “blackness,” a feeling of a mutual experience if not shared origin. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy said she hoped that the Obama effect would reshape the French elite by incorporating more people of color. (Never mind that it was her husband, who was the minister of the interior during the well-televised riots of 2005, who called the African and Arab youth protesting the death of two children “riff-raffs.”)

The 19-year-old Mortaud embodies the emerging pride and awareness around a global notion of blackness. Other than French and English, Mortaud speaks Spanish and Chinese and studies international business. “I want to incarnate … today’s French diversity,” she said according to the Associated Press.

In a video interview with Men’s Style, Mortaud names Halle Berry, who is also biracial, as an idol. Mortaud also identifies herself as “black,” which is rare in France when speaking about someone who is biracial. Presumably, she learned this from her black American mother, along with a worldview deeply influenced by the African-American experience.

As a true transnational, Mortaud delicately balances her Frenchness with American blackness. In the same interview with Men’s Style, she insists that she likes classical music (as any Miss France must) then quickly affirms her love for hip-hop and the artist Akon.

As Mortaud reportedly said, “This vote of the French well represents what is going on in the world.”

W. Hassan Marsh is a freelance journalist from Atlanta who has lived and traveled extensively in Francophone countries. He blogs at The Maroon Wanderer.

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Posted at 8:23 AM · Comments (0)

[Ed.’s note: This weird show was always special for me.]

Copyright Gawker

Patrick McGoohan, the co-creator and star of the 1960’s surreal, paranoid mystery series The Prisoner, died yesterday at the age of 80.

Though born in Queens, McGoohan got his start in the theatre in England, eventually making his way to British television, where The Prisoner was created as a miniseries in 1967. It’s a strange, almost un-pin-downable kind of series—it’s simultaneously about individuality and unanimity, the dark shadows of government, penny farthing bicycles, and giant bubbles that come out of the sea and kill people (so brilliantly parodied on The Simpsons. Poor Moleman.) McGoohan played Number 6, the otherwise-unnamed ex-spy who finds himself a prisoner in a strange Village and continuously tries to buck the system and escape.

McGoohan, who had previously turned down offers to play James Bond, went on to other cultish parts—in Escape From Alcatraz, Scanners, and The Phantom—but in the end was mostly known for the seventeen episodes he spent trapped in the ominous Village. I guess he’s free now, killer bubbles be damned.

You can watch every bizarre episode of The Prisoner here.

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Copyright Splice Today

ST: The New York Times’ stock is currently trading at about seven bucks a share. Good time for people to buy—anticipating a possible windfall if it’s sold—or is it best for small investors to shun all troubled media?

KA: Probably is a good time to buy, although the Times’ capital structure and governance, under which the Sulzberger family can do whatever they want, bless them, would make me a little nervous to own their stock as a non-rich non-Sulzberger. But the Times will, I think, survive as the surpassing global news brand.

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

…Do people really think that China can buy and buy when its investments here have already been hurt, and its government can see the enormous need to invest in its own economy? If a miracle happened, and China bought most of the $1.2 trillion from us, what would our state of dependency be then? We could be looking at as large a shift in the world’s financial balances as that which occurred between the British Empire and the United States between 1941 and 1945. Is everybody happy at that? Yet if foreigners show little appetite for U.S. bonds, we will soon have to push interest rates up.

If I have spent so much space on America’s fiscal woes, it is because I guess that its sheer depth and severity will demand most of our political attention over the next two years, and thus drive other important problems to the edges of our radar screen. It is true that the economies of Britain, Greece, Italy and a dozen other developed nations are hurting almost as badly, and that much of Africa and parts of Latin America are falling off the cliff. It is also true that the steep drop in energy prices has dealt a heavy blow to such charmless governments as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, with the hoped effect of curbing their mischief-making capacities.

On the other hand, the data so far suggest the economies of China and India are growing (not as fast as in the past but still growing), while America’s economy shrinks in absolute terms. When the dust settles on this alarming and perhaps protracted global economic crisis, we should not expect national shares of world production to be the same as in, say, 2005. Uncle Sam may have to come down a peg or two.

Moreover, no three or four of those countries — and perhaps not a dozen of them combined — have anywhere like the staggering array of overseas military commitments and deployments that weigh upon Uncle Sam’s shoulders. That brings us back, I’m sorry to say, to the “imperial overstretch” remarks I made some 20 years ago.

As I suggested at that time, a strong person, balanced and muscular, can carry an impressively heavy backpack uphill for a long while. But if that person is losing strength (economic problems), and the weight of the burden remains heavy or even increases (the Bush doctrine), and the terrain becomes more difficult (rise of new Great Powers, international terrorism, failed states), then the once-strong hiker begins to slow and stumble. That is precisely when nimbler, less heavily burdened walkers get closer, draw abreast, and perhaps move ahead.

If the above is even half-true, the conclusions are not pleasant: that the economic and political travails of the next several years will badly crimp many of the visions offered in Mr. Obama’s election campaign; that this nation will have to swallow, domestically, some very hard choices; and that we should not expect, even despite a surge in international goodwill towards America, any increase in our relative capacity to act abroad decisively or in any sustained way. A rather wonderful, charismatic and highly intelligent person will occupy the White House, but, alas, in the toughest circumstances the U.S. has faced since 1933 or 1945…

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

[Ed.’s note: A brilliant little bit here on the delusion of Washington centrism.]

Centrism is something of a cult here in Washington, D.C., and a more specious superstition you never saw. Its adherents pretend to worship at the altar of the great American middle, but in fact they stick closely to a very particular view of events regardless of what the public says it wants.

And through it all, centrism bills itself as the most transgressive sort of exercise imaginable. Its partisans are “New Democrats,” “Radical Centrists,” clear-eyed believers in a “Third Way.” The red-hot tepids, we might call them — the jellybeans of steel.

The reason centrism finds an enthusiastic audience in Washington, I think, is because it appeals naturally to the Beltway journalistic mindset, with its professional prohibition against coming down solidly on one side or the other of any question. Splitting the difference is a way of life in this cynical town. To hear politicians insist that it is also the way of the statesman, I suspect, gives journalists a secret thrill.

Yet what the Beltway centrist characteristically longs for is not so much to transcend politics but to close off debate on the grounds that he — and the vast silent middle for which he stands — knows beyond question what is to be done.

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Posted at 11:27 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

Here is a thought experiment that does not take very much thought. Picture, if you will, Hillary Clinton facing a foreign-policy conundrum. With whom will she discuss it first and most intently: with her president or her husband? (I did tell you that this wouldn’t be difficult.) Here’s another one: Will she be swayed in her foreign-policy decisions by electoral considerations focusing on the year 2012, and, if so, will she be swayed by President Barack Obama’s interests or her own?

The next question, and I must apologize in advance for once again making it an un-strenuous one, is: Who else will be approaching Bill Clinton for advice, counsel, and “input” on foreign affairs? It appears from the donor list of the Clinton Foundation that there is barely an oligarch, royal family, or special-interest group anywhere in the world that does not know how to get the former president’s attention. Just in the days since the foundation agreed to some disclosure of its previously “confidential” clients—in other words, since this became a condition for Sen. Clinton’s nomination to become secretary of state—we have additionally found former President Clinton in warm relationships with one very questionable businessman in Malaysia and with another, this time in Nigeria, who used to have close connections with that country’s ultracorrupt military dictatorship.
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The Nigerian example is an especially instructive one. Gilbert Chagoury is a major figure in land and construction in that country and has contributed between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as arranged a huge speaking fee for President Clinton at a Caribbean event and kicked in a large sum to his 1996 re-election campaign. In return for this, he has been received at the Clinton White House and more recently at Clinton-sponsored social events in New York and Paris. This may have helped to alleviate the sting of Chagoury’s difficulties in Nigeria itself. As a close friend of the country’s uniformed despot Gen. Sani Abacha, he benefited from some extremely profitable business arrangements during the years of dictatorship but was later compelled, after an investigation of his transactions, to return an estimated $300 million to the Nigerian treasury in exchange for a plea-bargaining arrangement by which his bank accounts could be unfrozen.

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Copyright Yahoo

“Rice is up. Rice, whom Aaron had said was the only one he’d seen with the ability to break his records, Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October.”
– A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind”

One of Giamatti’s successors as baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, was among those who called Jim Rice on Monday afternoon to congratulate him on his election to baseball’s Hall of Fame on his 15th and last appearance on the writers’ ballot.

“He said, ‘You’re in,’ ” Rice said. “ ‘You can’t think about those 14 years. You’re there, and they can’t take it away from you.’ ”

Three Hall of Famers have been elected on their last appearance on the writers’ ballot. Red Ruffing, the Yankees pitcher elected in 1967, was the first. Ralph Kiner, the Pirates slugger and Mets broadcaster, was the second, in 1975. The third is Rice, who joins Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski in giving the Boston Red Sox nearly 47 unbroken years of Hall of Fame left fielders, and like both of his illustrious predecessors, had a contentious relationship with the very group that is sending him to Cooperstown.

“Be patient,” Rice said, describing how he endured the years of coming up short, “and wait for the last out.”

It is advice perhaps now best embraced by Andre Dawson and Bert Blyleven, strong candidates who fell 44 and 67 votes shy, respectively, of the 405 required for election to the Hall. Rice, who was 16 votes short of election in 2008, received 412 this go-round, seven more than the 75 percent cutoff.

“I don’t know why it took me so long,” Rice said. “I don’t want to think about it. I’m in, and that’s what I’m going to cherish the most.”

Leave it to Rickey Henderson, the other Hall of Fame inductee Monday, to deliver the day’s funniest line, albeit unintentional.

“It’s been a long time coming. I was nervous, waiting,” said Henderson, who received 94.8 percent of votes cast in his first year of eligibility.

Henderson’s election was delayed only by his insistence on playing in the major leagues until the end of 2003, three months shy of his 45th birthday, and he played in independent leagues for two more years, hoping there would be another big-league team willing to prolong his career.

Rice said he never doubted his Hall credentials were bona fide, though should he venture into cyberspace, he would encounter some fierce debate, his critics contending that while he was a dominating hitter from 1975 to 1986, his falloff was dramatic thereafter, leaving his career numbers (.298 batting average, 398 home runs) short of being Hall-worthy.

The counterargument is that in those dozen seasons, few hitters were as feared as Rice, who won the American League MVP in 1978 and finished in the top five in MVP voting five other times. Since the expansion era began, only three hitters have had three seasons of 200 or more hits and 35 home runs: Alex Rodriguez, Vladimir Guerrero and Rice. Rice did it in consecutive seasons, from 1977 to 1979.

Whitey Herzog, when he managed the Kansas City Royals, once used four outfielders with Rice at the plate.

“What I would really like to do,” Herzog said, “is put two guys on the CITGO sign and two guys in the [left-field] net.”

It was Rice’s great misfortune that in 1975, his rookie season, he fractured his wrist and couldn’t play in the postseason, thus missing what many have called the greatest World Series ever, between the Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds. Fellow rookie Fred Lynn, who won the MVP and Rookie of the Year awards that season, did play and became famous, and enjoyed a positive relationship with the media.

Rice, like Williams and Yastrzemski before him, did not. In one celebrated incident, Rice tore the shirt off Red Sox beat writer Steve Fainaru (who later, as a war correspondent for the Washington Post, would win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Iraq).

Rice played for a team that was the last in major league baseball to integrate, and there was a racial component to his clashes with the media. Rice once claimed the reason he was standoffish was that certain members of the media threatened to “break him” during his rookie season. On nights the fans turned on him, they taunted him with chants of “Uncle Ben,” after the rice product.

“Ted Williams said the only thing he disliked about his stay in Boston was dealing with the press,” former Sox pitcher Bill Lee once said. “Jimmy Rice is having trouble handling it and I can understand why.”

Rice’s career ended badly in Boston. With his skills declining, manager Joe Morgan lifted him for a pinch-hitter, Spike Owen, in one game. A humiliated Rice blew up, pulled the manager into the dugout runway and wound up suspended for three games. Rice was vilified in the media for his actions. That was in 1988. A year later, he was released.

There are those who believe that had Rice played the PR game, he would not have waited until Monday to receive the call from the Hall. Many voters would tell you that their objections were based solely on performance. But for those voters on the fence, his reputation almost certainly did him no favors.

On Monday, Rice said that no longer mattered.

“As far as what took so long,” he said, “I have no idea, but I’m glad it’s over with. I’m not going to bad-mouth any writers. I’m looking forward to today and days to come.”

Posted at 12:44 AM · Comments (0)

I’ve created a new gallery in my photography website by the name of Echo Valley consisting of photographs from my “lao jia,” my homeland, in the deepest sense of the word, in north-central Virginia. There’s an accompanying essay in the “News” section of the website. Please enjoy.

Click to visit the gallery

Posted at 7:54 PM · Comments (0)

This is an amazingly smart and timely look at one of the most ambitious international development efforts ever undertaken in Africa — by China, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, no less.
Jamie Monson is a tireless researcher and insightful thinker who writes with grace.
I read it in late manuscript. Forthcoming from Indiana University Press.

Posted at 11:51 AM · Comments (1)

A look at the enormous transformations underway in China from a sharp-eyed and engaging Indian journalist. Her take is often very different — refreshingly so — from the standard Western reporter’s look at the same landscape.

Link

Posted at 11:48 AM · Comments (0)

Inside the invisible demi-Holocaust of the Congo. Powerful and brilliant. Highly recommended.

Link

Posted at 11:23 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Age

January 12, 2009

CHINA’S Communist Party has significantly tightened propaganda controls by shutting down the country’s most vibrant and influential intellectual discussion platform.

The move to shut down the Bullog website follows a prominent warning last week by China’s propaganda chief, Li Changchun, that the Party would tighten internet controls over “vulgar” content.

Bullog founder Luo Yonghao did not answer phone calls yesterday but he previously told a news agency that he received official confirmation on Friday afternoon of the site’s closure.

Mr Luo told The Age he had received an email from the Beijing Communications Administration saying the website contained harmful comments on current affairs and therefore would be closed.

Bullog has recently grown to become the most important platform for Chinese intellectuals and commentators to debate policy and political developments, with its daily viewers exceeding 1 million last April.

Increased propaganda restrictions are being interpreted as a sign of leadership panic about the social ramifications of China’s sudden economic slowdown and a series of politically fraught anniversaries that could act as a lightning rod for dissent.

“This is a question of the current political climate,” said a leading blogger who contributes to Bullog and writes under the name North Wind. “Bullog has been closed before, but this time it’s going to be hard to reopen.”

But Mr Luo told The Age: “We will definitely open again. If it can’t be in China then we will open our website overseas.”

Data is likely to be released this week showing a precipitous decline in exports and industrial production for December, which may signal an outright contraction in an economy that has averaged 10 per cent annual growth for the past 30 years.

Chinese estimates of the number of manufacturing, construction and other workers who have already lost their jobs range from 6 to 20 million.

The economic turmoil will coincide with a year of political milestones including the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square “incident”, the 50th anniversary of the “Liberation” of Tibet and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.

Websites are far more important social and political discussion forums in China than elsewhere because they generally allow a greater range of debate than the country’s tightly controlled mainstream media.

“China lacks freedom of speech but the blog is like a private medium for intellectuals,” said Chinese media researcher Michael Anti.

“If you shut down all the liberal platforms for bloggers, that means the liberal voices cannot be heard in the public sphere and that will be a real problem for civil society,” he said.

Bullog was the leading domestic source of information and commentary about “Charter 08”, a democratic manifesto signed by hundreds of leading Chinese intellectuals last month.

Liu Xiaobo, an intellectual behind the Charter who was also a veteran of the Tiananmen protests, was detained at the time of the Charter’s publication a month ago while dozens of other signatories have been interrogated.

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Copyright The Washington Post
Saturday, January 10, 2009

The Hairy Man — skinny, skeezy, looks like a lost member of Jethro Tull? — must have represented some male ideal at some point, but that is a memory we have repressed. The big toe was surely never the “magnificent erotic organ” it was made out to be.

Yet something about “The Joy of Sex” resonated with people — or at least reached them, parked as it was on the New York Times bestseller list for years after its 1972 release. It went directly from shelf to nightstand drawer, where kids found it and went “eww.”

It scintillated, it titillated, it taught French you never learned from Madame Cousin. But most of all, it normalized. In the boudoir, everyone was okay, and everyone could be taught. Subtitled “A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking,” with such chapter headings as Starters, Main Courses and Sauces & Pickles, doctor-author Alex Comfort’s book made being a sexpert a snobby hobby. Like cheese-tasting, but naked.

This week in bookstores, an overhaul. A major overhaul — not like the smaller updates done over the years. “The Joy of Sex: The Timeless Guide to Lovemaking” has 42 new sections mixed in with the old standards like cassoulet and pattes d’araignee. Comfort died in 2000, so Susan Quilliam, a British relationship shrink, stepped in to write new content and balance out the phallocentric worship from the original.

According to “Joy’s” introduction, this version was written to benefit the “ordinary, sexually active reader.”

Ordinary? What, in the “Joy of Sex” world, does that mean, anyway?

* * *

Spoiler alert: People still have sex. The mechanics of it haven’t changed since 1972, AD or BC. We might be overwhelmed with info now (See: “Internet”), but the popularity and longevity of “Joy” make it seem a lot more trustworthy than, say, “Tickle His Pickle,” $10.17 on Amazon. It’s been a bellwether of human sexuality for decades.

But it really did need an update. Sections of the original read like shag-carpeted relics. The anti-condoms attitude, especially, but also the sex on horseback (we’re outraged, too, PETA); the aversion to shaving anything (especially the Hairy Man); and the assertion that regular orgies were the way of the future (only in some exurbs). Reading him 37 years later, Comfort sounds a lot like your lecherous great-uncle.

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A very compelling take on Chongqing, one of my favorite places in China:

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Copyright Atlantic

(Ed.’s note: A very smart piece about the quandary of the traditional print news business. Well worth clicking the link for the whole article.)

Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print—the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. Most of these scenarios assume a gradual crossing-over, almost like the migration of dunes, as behaviors change, paradigms shift, and the digital future heaves fully into view. The thinking goes that the existing brands—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal—will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as sources of original reporting.

But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if TheNew York Times goes out of business—like, this May?

It’s certainly plausible. Earnings reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400million in debt. With more than $1billion in debt already on the books, only $46million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company’s debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper’s future doesn’t look good.

“As part of our analysis of our uses of cash, we are evaluating future financing arrangements,” the Times Company announced blandly in October, referring to the crunch it will face in May. “Based on the conversations we have had with lenders, we expect that we will be able to manage our debt and credit obligations as they mature.” This prompted Henry Blodget, whose Web site, Silicon Alley Insider, has offered the smartest ongoing analysis of the company’s travails, to write: “‘We expect that we will be able to manage’? Translation: There’s a possibility that we won’t be able to manage.”

The paper’s credit crisis comes against a backdrop of ongoing and accelerating drops in circulation, massive cutbacks in advertising revenue, and the worst economic climate in almost 80 years. As of December, its stock had fallen so far that the entire company could theoretically be had for about $1 billion. The former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal often said he couldn’t imagine a world without The Times. Perhaps we should start.

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Copyright The Independent

Tuesday, 6 January 2009

There is no news out of Ghana, at least no news of the usual sort we have come to expect from modern day Africa. They have just had a general election there and the ruling party lost, so its leader has stepped down to make way for the opposition. No violence in the streets. No mass stuffing of ballot boxes. No mediation by the United Nations. No bogus power-sharing deals which will subsequently be slyly abrogated by some gerontocratic madman. Nothing like we have seen in Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe or several of the other powerhouses of the African continent.

The truth is that there are increasing numbers of countries like Ghana which do not fit our easy African stereotypes. It has a strong unicameral Parliament. It has vibrant and autonomous newspapers and radio which place it in the top quartile of world indices on press freedom. It has a resolute and respected electoral commission, which recently investigated claims of vote-rigging and intimidation from both main parties and ruled them to be insubstantial – and persuaded the nation to abide by the outcome of the poll, even though there was barely 40,000 votes out of 9 million between the presidential candidates.

Contrary to rumour, democracy is flourishing in much of Africa. Many factors combine in this. Economic growth has been strong across much of the continent. A new entrepreneurship and a stronger middle class is emerging. A rich variety of pressure groups and community organisations are learning how to hold their governments to account.

Ghana is proof of how things can change. After a long series of coups, it has now seen a president step down from office, as the constitution demands, not once, but twice. The country is still poor; almost 90 per cent of its people rely on smallholder agriculture and the economy still relies significantly on aid. But most Ghanaians have access to education, its entrepreneurs have significant freedom and levels of political and financial corruption are comparatively low.

Out of all that, democracy is taking deeper root. The country which was the first in colonial Africa to gain its independence is now showing the way forward in other ways too.

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

JANUARY 6, 2009

BEIJING — For years, this sprawling city of 17 million seemed destined to be the next 1970s Los Angeles, with traffic jams and endless commutes. But suddenly, Beijing flows.

For years, sprawling Beijing seemed destined to be another Los Angeles, with endless traffic jams and long commutes. But suddenly, Beijing flows. Credit an ambitious subway network that’s finally starting to draw commuters off the street.

Credit an ambitious subway network that is finally starting to draw commuters off the street. Spurred by the Olympics, the project symbolizes Beijing’s goal of entering the big leagues — and is dramatically changing the urban fabric of a city that for centuries followed ancient geomantic principles by avoiding breaking the earth’s surface.

The new subway network boasts eight lines with 123 stops stretching about 120 miles. It is due to expand over the next seven years to 348 miles of mostly underground track, 50% longer than New York City’s network. The system has already spurred new businesses and changed habits: Once, only the poor rode public transportation in Beijing. But now, the subway is crowded every morning with urban professionals.

“I like it because you can count on it,” says Rayman Yu, managing director of Starflight International Media Co., a talent agency. “It’s clean and safe and modern.”

The subway is part of Beijing’s transformation to a more urbane metropolis. “The subway was designed to put New York City in the urban big leagues and to feel that way,” says Clifton Hood, a professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York. “You get that sense in Asia, too.”

The new system has radically changed Beijing and its aversion to subsurface building. Until recently, there were no catacombs, crypts or even basements in Beijing. Part of the reason was due to principles of feng shui, or geomancy, which held that digging underground was inauspicious. Beijing’s once-high water tables also discouraged much below-surface activity.

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Copyright Time

An excerpt:

“Journalists now read the business pages the way octogenarians read the obituaries. The Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times, declared bankruptcy. National Public Radio laid off 7% of its staff. The New York Times mortgaged its headquarters. Media companies from Viacom to NBC to Gannett to (gulp) Time Inc. had massive layoffs. Newspapers contemplated not publishing on certain days, going online-only or closing altogether. It’s enough to make journalists wonder, Is this the end?”

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

The photographer William Eggleston has always depended on the kindness of editors. This shy, dissolute Southern cavalier (soon to be 70 years old) has almost never held a job or selected his own work for a book or an exhibition. It’s as though reading a storyline into the tens of thousands of images he has shot around the world since the 1960s were superfluous or vulgar, something for others to bother with.

At the beginning of his career he left that task to two of the most capable minds in American art: Walter Hopps, who discovered him in 1970 when he was director of the Corcoran Gallery; and John Szarkowski, who as director of the Department of Photographs at the Museum of Modern Art gave Mr. Eggleston a one-man show in 1976 that changed the course of photography as an art.

That controversial exhibition and its peculiar catalog, “William Eggleston’s Guide,” legitimized color photography, overturning a hierarchy that had favored black-and-white since the medium’s invention. Unlike artists of earlier generations, Mr. Eggleston did not use color for freakish or decorative effect but with a natural ease, “as though the blue and the sky were one thing,” in Mr. Szarkowski’s appreciative phrase.

Editing Mr. Eggleston is vital, and this function, even before the deaths last year of Messrs. Hopps and Szarkowski, had passed in this decade to the German curator and writer Thomas Weski. Deputy director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, he organized “Los Alamos,” the sprawling 2003 exhibition of photographs that Mr. Eggleston took around the U.S. between 1964 and 1974, and he is co-curator, with Elizabeth Sussman, of “Democratic Camera,” the retrospective now at the Whitney Museum through Jan. 25.

Mr. Eggleston’s temperament is that of a boulevardier. His books seldom have a single theme and never feature a group of identifiable characters. They don’t even confine themselves to a single city, state or country. Instead, his international oeuvre — mainly shot with small-format cameras in available light — consists of tiny epiphanies that correlate only if you want them to. The seeming randomness of the artist’s attention, as much as the color, is what baffled many viewers back in 1976.

What were the connections, if any, between places and people? Did the dog sipping from a puddle in the road have anything to do with the naked man standing in a red room with graffiti on the walls? Were the green-tiled shower and the interior of the oven in the same house? (I once asked Mr. Eggleston if he had ever photographed methodically. “I’ve taken a few stabs at it and it’s just not me,” he replied.)

Mr. Weski and Ms. Sussman have kept things loosely chronological but not imposed too much order. A room of his grainy black-and-white photos from the 1960s conveys ambiguous reactions to his native South undergoing suburbanization. Another room features a legendary black-and-white video he made in 1973-74. “Stranded in Canton,” as he titles it, offers a peek at the artist’s bizarre and fluid social world and his nonjudgmental attitude toward what his camera sees. Shot mainly at night in New Orleans, it has appearances by Delta bluesman Furry Lewis, a man biting the head off a chicken, and numerous rambling monologists.

The rest of the show is color, done with the fresh, restless eye for which Mr. Eggleston is renowned. He should be a hero to any artist opposed to the pompous or monumental. During the ’70s and ’80s he looked at things few had noticed before — the objects that collect under a bed, the strange emptiness of a suburban garage, an evening meal set for one — and he discovered therein unique harmonies and discontinuties that only a color photographer could grasp.

Many photographers since Walker Evans have focused on decaying structures and mourned the replacement of the ramshackle cabin with the new mall. Mr. Eggleston shares that sensibility. But when he switched to color in the late ’60s and early ’70s, first with transparencies and then with print film, he also recorded the wide range of hues unique to the industrial age: the faded paint of automobiles and storefronts, the many shades of gray and brown in cement and macadam, the bold solids and stripes of manufactured clothing.

Against these synthetic dyes, he has often contrasted a girl’s red hair or dark skin, a scruffy patch of grass, a pattern of sun across a sink, a startling blue sky. Such combinations of manmade and natural color exist everywhere and help to define the look of our time, even if most of us have failed to pay attention.

Looking inside a freezer, he finds that ice has a lavender tinge. A woman’s hand stirring a drink aboard an airplane seems to turn it into gold as sun through the window strikes the glass. Many artists have fallen for early morning dappled light. But in his photograph of a phone off the hook on a flowered sheet, the sun at that hour gives extra temporal mystery to a scene of a conversation interrupted for reasons we are not privy to…

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Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

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Copyright The Boston Globe

A young man buys a magazine at the Out of Town News newsstand in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. He shows it to a friend. It could have happened at any time over the past five decades at the newsstand in the busy crossroads.

But the two young men were Paul Allen and Bill Gates, the co-founders of Microsoft. And the magazine was the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics where they read about a primitive personal computer — and it dawned upon them that someday a computer would be in every home and on every desk.

“I can still remember grabbing the Popular Electronics as if it was yesterday,” Allen, who made the fateful purchase, said last week in a statement.

It’s the stuff of which legends are made. It’s also another episode in the rich history of the newsstand, which is facing an uncertain future. Hudson News of East Rutherford, N.J., has told the city that it does not plan to renew its lease Jan. 31, citing a diminished demand for printed news, the Globe reported last month. The city is seeking new vendors who can make a newsstand work on the site.

The possible demise of Out of Town News, which has been in business since 1955 and is on the National Register of Historic Places, has shocked and dismayed some people. Other notable newsstand visitors have included John Kenneth Galbraith, who bought a copy of Le Monde there every day; Julia Child, who searched for obscure Italian and German cooking magazines; and Robert Frost, who stopped by to get directions to a reading.

The city, which owns the property at the center of the square, is seeking proposals by Jan. 8, and 11 different entities had shown interest by last week, said City Councilor Brian Murphy.

“It may be a different vendor, but I think we will be able to maintain its iconic stature,” said Murphy, who lives in Harvard Square.

Sheldon Cohen, who founded the newsstand in 1955 and sold it to Hudson in 1994, said he may be among the bidders. He said times have changed from when he shipped in newspapers by air, selling up to 600 London papers on Sundays and 1,500 Irish papers a week.

He said he was developing some new ideas to make the newsstand viable in the 21st century. “It would be a newsstand, but I have a new vision,” he said, declining to divulge any details.

Gates has previously described the purchase of the magazine by Allen in Harvard Square as a pivotal point. “As we read excitedly about the first truly personal computer, Paul and I didn’t know exactly how it would be used, but we were sure it would change us and the world of computing. We were right. The personal-computer revolution happened and it has affected millions of lives,” Gates wrote in a 1995 Newsweek essay.

It wasn’t clear, however, exactly where Allen bought the magazine. Allen confirmed last week that he bought the magazine at Out of Town News, his spokesman said.

“It’s just interesting, one of those things. A small event that day obviously changed a lot of things,” said Allen spokesman David Postman. “He always remembers buying the magazine that day and seeing the computer on the cover … And you can imagine what went through his head.”

Allen’s recollection sets up a painful irony. The computers that Allen and Gates helped to make ubiquitous are now reducing the demand for news on printed paper, endangering the newsstand where it all began just thee decades ago.

It might have been better for the newsstand if Sheldon Cohen had said to Allen, “Sorry, young man, this magazine is just not for you,” and offered him Sports Illustrated instead.

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