On Coups

Noli Irritare Leones puts together a short primer on coups with particular attention to the March 2009 coup in Madagascar.

Quotation is from the Oxford Council on Good Governance, which is cited in the above posting [OCGG Security Recommendation No. 4 on the Mauritanian coup of 2005(.pdf)]:

The US has in this context pursued a short-sighted policy towards Mauritania. This policy guided by fixed principles and the focus on fighting against a perceived Islamist terrorist threat in Mauritania without respect for and knowledge of the specific Mauritanian context, was doomed to fail and gave rise to last week’s events.

What's Going On

1. The Twins beat Detroit Tuesday and were beat by the Yankees Wednesday and are now resting up; also there seems to be (as seen in Modell's sports clothes store at the mall) serious Swisher fandom in Yankeedom. (That's two first basemen the Yankees have gotten from the Athletics lately, and Giambi is kicking around somewhere post-release. You think they'd learn...)


2. Irving Penn, photographer.


3. Via Brilliant at Breakfast, Keith Olbermann talks about health care and the current system.

   Olbermann is the kind of rich, famous person who gives Republicans fits, because he hasn't lost his soul just because he's got some money. Here's a man who recently lost his mother to breast cancer, and has spent much of the last month navigating the health care system with his ailing father, to whom he appears to be clinging like a shipwreck survivor clutching at a fragment of deck chair.



4. From the Daily Herald, via sirriamnis, via supergee: Kid smacked (verbally) down by alleged adult lawyer over library.

   "I used to go to the library knowing there were people there to help me find a book. Now there is no one to help me," Sydney said solemnly. "It will never be the same without the people you fired."
   
   Sydney nestled back into her seat, but that didn't stop 69-year-old criminal attorney Constantine "Connie" Xinos from boldly putting her in her place.
   
   "Those who come up here with tears in their eyes talking about the library, put your money where your mouth is," Xinos shot back. He told Sydney and others who spoke against the layoffs of the three full-time staffers (including the head librarian and children's librarian) and two part-timers to stop "whining" and raise the money themselves.

   Mr. Xinos himself:

   "You may like the library, but when you call 9-1-1, you want a policeman or a fireman before someone to tell you where the books are in the library," says the man who has talked of privatizing, outsourcing or even closing the library.
   
   "I understand that my philosophy is conservative," Xinos says, adding that government just needs to catch bad guys, put out fires, fix the streets and make sure buildings are sturdy.
   
   He campaigned, successfully, against a plan to bring subsidized housing for seniors into town by declaring, "I don't want to live next to poor people. I don't want poor people in my town."
   
   A poor kid who grew up in Berwyn and worked in his dad's cafeteria in Chicago, Xinos went to law school and served in the Marines.

   Maybe he was shushed by a librarian. Ya think?

Alive and Well

Lower Manhattanite, that is.

(It's pretty hot.)

In Memoriam

Sarah E. Wright, writer.

Ms. Wright’s novel was among the first to focus on the confluence of race, class and sex. Republished by the Feminist Press in 1986 and again in 2002, “This Child’s Gonna Live” remains in print today.

Rundown

Tigers and Twins are tied (fit to be, anyway) and will perform the 1-game playoff dance (yes) Tuesday.

In Memoriam

In alphabetical order:

• Marek Edelman, commander in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising;
• Mr. Magic, deejay;
• Donal McLaughlin, graphic designer;
• Douglas Watt, theater critic.

We're Not Children Anymore

The second part of what Arthur Silber was saying this week. A paragraph:

I do not maintain that these issues are obvious; I have remarked before that it took me several years of intensive reading and thinking to grasp them as I do now. But the truth of this overall argument is no more "secret" than the allegedly "secret" information upon which the Daddy State relies when it decides to hurl us into the abyss. But the Daddy State desperately wants you to believe that it possesses "special, secret information" which you can never access. In this way, the Daddy State maintains and expands its power, as it commands obedience from subjects who are forever condemned to ignorance on the most momentous questions.

Speaking of Baseball

Colorado has clinched the NL Wildcard, and is still contending in the Western Division. The Tigers and Twins seem determined to take it down to the wire.

And Jerry Izenberg, columnist emeritus at the Newark Star-Ledger, writes about Pop Lloyd Weekend in Atlantic City, the reunion of Negro League players, who grow few and old.

They gather this weekend accompanied by tunes of glory. The gray hair will fade, the waistlines will melt and their laughter and their tears will say to all of us:
‘‘Never forget we were here. Never forget we were history. Never forget that the past we forged was America’s prologue.’’

Speaking of the Emperor's Wardrobe

Driftglass is so very On the Case.

Villagers: But isn't saying mean things about Republicans just as bad as praying to Allah for the Sun to explode?

No.

Villager: Isn't saying mean things about Republicans as bad as setting fire to a bus full of widows with an Easter Bunny!

No.

Villagers: Feeding live babies to a dog?

No.

James Carville: Boy howdy, ah tell you at least this man haid the guts to come right ohn The Situation Room ™ and say what he said!

Wolf Blitzer: Yes. He did come on The Situation Room ™.

Villagers: Yes. Yes. How very brave of him come on the The Situation Room ™.

Yesterday

Chick chicky boom chick chicky boom chick chicky boom.

And now I need to email people and practice yelling "Get off my lawn!"

Rock-tober

Phillies have clinched. Boston is the AL Wildcard. There don't look to be any come-from-behind or sudden-collapse surprises this year. Darn.

Arthur Silber Has a Dream

And it's a horrorshow.

And that was the other deeply frightening aspect of my nightmare. Most other people did believe him. Even those people who said they had serious doubts about the truth of his claims proceeded to debate those claims as if they had some merit that deserved scrutiny. I tried to explain why nothing he said should be regarded with any degree of seriousness, but no one would listen to me. They engaged in endless debates over the particulars of his accusations. Since none of his claims was based in fact, all such debates were entirely futile. But my accuser -- this monster who had brutalized, tortured, raped and murdered an unending succession of innocent victims -- had achieved his primary aim: his accusations were regarded as legitimate, if only to the extent that they had to be disproved. Even if those who doubted my accuser's claims succeeded in debunking this particular set of claims, this monster without a conscience knew that he had won the most critical battle. He would simply invent another series of groundless claims. And so another debate over a another series of fictions would ensue; this pattern would be repeated endlessly. Finally, in time, I would be punished, just as my accuser demanded.

Kafka was an optimist.

No Water in the Pool

Brief thought on Polanski: Link is from Anglachel's Journal. Much better phrased.

Also, I stopped by flip flopping joy, who had a suggestion about why we defend people with power rather than their victims:

But I do wonder how culturally trained we are to challenge/question people with power rather than respect and admire them (think: He’s a police officer, what were you thinking?? Or, he’s your *teacher*, you respect him! Or; Don’t you talk to your mother like that! etc). It’s not just that a person *gets* something from defending and supporting a person in power (i.e. a job, money, prestige, etc), but that going *against* a person in power is not just “supporting the survivor” but directly challenging the entire power structure U.S. culture is based on.

Huh.

Intermediate

OK, the Angels have clinched the Western Division, and Boston has all-but-clinched the Wildcard.

Your Baseball Update

Yankees clinch. Boston and Texas are duking it out for the AL wild card. Detroit and Minnesota still wrestling, Angels and Rangers playing out the skein (if the Republican Party en masse were to be infected with a virus that compels the victim to tell the truth at all times, the Rangers might have a shot of coming from behind. Maybe). The Cubs were finally eliminated, and St. Louis has clinched. Florida bit the big one, so the competition is between Philadelphia and Atlanta. The Dodgers and the Rockies, well, I don't think it's the Rockies' year. There will be NL wild card eliminations coming up right after this important word from--

Sorry. Wrong patter.

Meanwhile, what the hell are Nashville and Columbus doing in the NHL?

Actually Further Than the Pull Quote

Quixote at Shakesville: What's wrong with people. A sample:

The solution is to take away power from the those who've grabbed too much of it. We don't need a reorg. Or not just a reorg. We need to return to accountability. And not in some braindead, No Child Left Untested, cheap, easy, and ineffective way. Politicians who don't represent their constituents need to lose elections. The media has to fulfill its role in creating that crucial component of democracy: an informed electorate. Corporations need to be responsible for their actions.

It's that scary "get to the root" stuff.

Knew I'd forget something...

Why being able to cash your checks at the supermarket is important. From Anglachel's Journal.

That Pennant Thing (Double Play)

The Cubs are still (!) 1 game from elimination, but the White Sox are out.

Prof Susurro (Like a Whisper) reviews Surrogate (with spoilers) and finds it problematic on several points.

Busting Mythology

From The Hathor Legacy: The myth of the woman who craves abuse. Because pop culture's narrative lies.

Late-Breaking

Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox are one game away from elimination from their respective divisional races.

Sadly, San Francisco has slipped below that event horizon. They are still in contention for the wild card slot, but fourth place is an unlikely launch pad for the drive to first. Anything could happen, though. And has.

Pigs, goats, garbage, and Terry Pratchett.

Twofer

Today's Daily Howler tackles two topics:

1. Health care reform:

   It isn’t hard to explain how much the French spend on health care. In his report, Post reporter Edward Cody cites the 2007 OECD data. Here’s what those data tell us:
   
   Total spending on health care, per person, 2007
   United States: $7290
   France: $3601
   
   There! Do you see how easy that is? The French spend less than half what we spend! But go ahead—try to tease any such knowledge out of Cody’s lengthy report! Surely, we must have a National Censor, one who’s charged with keeping us clueless about the foreign experience.
   
   Cody’s first peculiar moment arrives in paragraph 4. “France has long been proud of its national health insurance, part of a many-tentacled and costly social protection system designed to embrace almost everyone who is legally in the country,” he writes (our emphasis).

2. Pundits who "get" race and miss, for example, corporate malfeasance:

   Rich is so in love with yelling race, he can’t quite bring himself to get it. As Sleeper said, he doesn’t really understand that Beck’s declaration here (his “rant”) actually seems to [be] right. Wall Street does seem to own the government—and when Beck names the names of the corporations involved, he is naming a lot of accurate names. (When Eliot Spitzer did this on Maddow, he disappeared from the program.)
   
   Indeed: Just as Sleeper said in his piece, Rich can’t quite bring himself to understand the accuracy or the anger lodged in this analysis. He quotes Beck naming G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart, Citigroup. And sure enough! In his very next paragraph, he goes right back to implying this is all about race.

The fun never ends.

Excellent Book Review

Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker reviews Louis Begley's Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters.

Remember how I love book reviews? This one's a beauty. It connects modernism, European anti-Semitism, national transformation, societal turning points, ideals and realities, history, culture, and deferred but eventual justice.

Just as picking up A Distant Mirror or The Proud Tower means that I disappear into that milieu until I've finished rereading the entire book (which is why both tomes are presently somewhere slightly difficult to reach, that I may at least try to get on with life), so thoroughly evocative of those times is Tuchman, so does any piece on turn-of-the-[previous]-century France rivet my attention (why yes, somewhere in here is Janet Flanner's reportage from early 20th century Paris, which gave me new names to pique my interest when I saw them elsewhere). Most of the roots of "modern" (i.e. late 20th century cultural, political, social, and fashion) life were sunk back then. (World War I sank the rest.) And the Dreyfus "affair" intersected with culture and politics in far-reaching and unimaginable-at-the-time ways.

A taste. Maybe a full bite:

Begley wants to use the occasion not for French-bashing, or for reciting the enduring history of European anti-Semitism, bleak as it is, but as a pointed warning and reminder of how fragile the standards of civilized conduct prove in moments of national panic. The Dreyfus affair matters, he believes, because we have, in the past decade, made our own Devil’s Island and hundreds of new Dreyfuses—the Dreyfus affair matters because we’re still in the middle of it. Begley, as he recounts the story of the Parisian fin-de-siècle legal drama, also spends many pages showing that among the prisoners in places like Guantánamo are many Dreyfuses—innocent, as he was, and, on the whole, much worse treated. He wants to arraign Americans, and particularly those who fetishize the Dreyfus case without grasping its principles: that every accused person should be able to face his accusers in a fair trial, and that national panic makes bad policy and false prisoners.

and

In any modernized country, the backward-looking party will always tend toward resentment and grievance. The key is to keep the conservatives feeling that they are an alternative party of modernity. (This was Disraeli’s great achievement, as it was, much later, de Gaulle’s.) When the conservative party comes to see itself as unfairly marginalized, it becomes a party of pure reaction, which is what happened to the French right after Dreyfus. Instead of purging the anti-Semites, people on the right decided to rally behind them. They came to hate the idea of the Republic itself..

and

The lesson to be learned was the lesson that Clemenceau had tried to teach the jury at Zola’s trial. The urge to protect the nation from its enemies by going around the corner to get them is natural, but what you get is usually not the enemies, and, going around the corner, you bump into something worse. Breaking the law to defend the nation ends up breaking the nation. Sometimes long stories have short morals.

I remember looking this up in our newish World Book Encyclopedia, probably after seeing The Life of Emile Zola on TV, probably around the time that Paul Muni died. There were many mentions of the case in places like Vogue and Time (the magazine) and Exodus (the movie) and a full section in The Proud Tower.

Just to be sure there is no misunderstanding: Je suis une Dreyfusarde.

Please read the whole thing, even though it is more than three paragraphs.

I might crosspost this.

Another Departure

Well, the Cubs have hung on for another day, but Seattle has been eliminated.

Blithering

So yesterday, I did one long post with a number of links and then I went and annoyed the gang at Dreamwidth by dribbling out five (or six?) little posts. Obviously, this is Bad.

On the other hand this belongs here.

We once had rules, enforced by priests—by an elite comprised of people like Murrow. No, that wasn’t a perfect system. But now, the democratization of media has given us a loud, inane, morning zoo jock—a man by the name of Beck. And we have no national press corps which is willing to apply old standards to such low-grade practitioners.

Someone on my prowls brought up A Face in the Crowd. (Name to be added when I find that again.) True, very true, and more difficult now to root out because that stuff is all tape-delayed. (Although I also believe that "standards" only repel the worst of this kind of "entertainer." "Standards" was also the network euphemism for "Censor.")

One of the mercies of not having a TV is that I never see any of this crap.

Also, St. Louis should clinch tomorrow.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

Henry Jenkins runs in my rut!

MySpace is described as "crowded, trashy, creepy, uneducated, immature, predators, crazy" while Facebook was praised as "selective, clean, trustworthy, educated, authentic, college, private." In other words, MySpace takes on values we associate with inner city slums, while Facebook is tied to the values one might associate with a gated community.

(Emphasis mine.)

To be fair: I've visited MySpace exactly once and it looked like it might be fun for people who go in for heavy social networking. Which is not me. I also visited LinkedIn once and ran immediately into Guy Kawasaki's page and have been too intimidated to go there again.

To be even more fair: I used to live in New York City. I like to explore and travel, and you can find almost anything in New York by taking the subway and walking. (In The Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, subway, bus, and walking. On Staten Island, mostly bus, because that subway is a single line unconnected to the rest of the world.) You can at any moment characterize almost any neighborhood in Manhattan, including the Very Upper East Side, the way MySpace is characterized above.

That is exactly why everyone wants to live in The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. (Yes, I am thinking of a certain editor who, offered the editorship of Some Prestigious Magazine, turned it down because he couldn't get (or couldn't be guaranteed, I forget which) an apartment with a doorman in Manhattan.)

Let me drop a small secret here: Many people live in Manhattan without doormen. Even in ritzier nabes.

The other thing is that very few people believe that Facebook's "values" are New York virtues. New York is proudly heterodox (there may even be New Yorkers who'd sympathize with that guy Rocker) in all matters. Not terribly clean, either, although Montréal on Sunday morning is also grungy. Authentic, sure, but more in (ha!) a MySpace way. And the "educated...college" thing is a legacy from Facebook's origins, which probably means smart trolls.

By the way? Facebook has claimed rights to members' materials. That's not what I'd call "trustworthy."

Oh, yes. New York over Smoke Rise forever.

Unpacking the Blogs

1. Milwaukee joins the Mathematically Eliminated.


2. Educators not happy with Federal education policies:

   If the education profession as a whole had insisted on determining effective practices that reflect the realities of learning, rather than caving in to the push to reduce the complexities of learning into scores for simplistic funding models, then we might be looking at a different scenario now. And the education departments of colleges and universities are just as much to blame, for their ubiquitous lack of spine in confronting fearful administrators and obnoxious politicians.

   Via Mills River Progressive via McClatchy Newspapers.


3. Anglachel's Journal on food and how privilege intersects with it:

   I think about the industry of shaming fat people. I think about scarfing down ice cream, ashamed I am doing so because I'm fat. I think about the self-indulgence of watching rock concerts to stop hunger. I think of the anxiety about not ingesting the courant food of the month. I think about the miracle elixers that will save us all from the heartbreak of some obscure condition. I look at case after case of frozen convenience foods and their bar codes. I think about quaint little groceries in the Oakland Hills with prices written by hand onto the shelf tags. I think of relatives who sneer at stores I rely on. I think about the medicalization of food, turning eating as such into a pathology. I think about the transformation of food into a visible sign of personal rectitude.



4. Why accessibility training is important. From Rolling Around in My Head:

   So what part of accessibility training did they miss when they direct a guy in a wheelchair to a staired entrance. Is there any hope for disability training if those attending think we can just pop out of our chairs, climb up a set of stairs with our wheelchairs on our backs. Um, that's not disabled.

5. Driftglass shows David Brooks for what he is.

   Seriously, why isn’t the ghost of Pigmeat Markham beating the crap out of these clowns with his pig bladder?
   

   WARNING: Language that would not be out of place at a performance by Lenny Bruce (or, for that matter, Sarah Silverman), but which workplaces frown upon.


6. Shakesville spotlights Doctor Grumpy in the House. A tiny taste:

   [A] few days go by. BII will claim they never got our fax. Or that we filled the form out wrong. Or that they don't cover Capricorns when the moon is in Pisces. And we don't know this until Annie calls back after a few days, because they're hoping we forgot about it.

7. Art Ferrante has died. (Mr. Teicher died last year.)

Quickie

I'm late for the ball game, but: Anglachel turns in a report on the reason the Southern Strategy works. Research (aaaaaiiiiiiieeeeeeee!) is indicated.

Sunday Morning Thought

One of my great pleasures is reading really good book reviews.

No, not reviews of good books; well-written disquisitions on a book, its author, and its history, preferably the history of the writing, but the history of the time in which the book was written is always interesting and occasionally required. I learn a lot from essays centered on volumes of fiction and non-fiction, and I was looking forward, this morning, to pointing you at two lovely reviews in Harper's, one on The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard and the other on Bite the Hand that Feeds You: Essays and Provocations by Henry Fairlie, of whom I had never heard, but unlike the political reportage, the thoughtful work requires a subscription to read. As it happens, I have a subscription to the hard copy, but apparently I spaced the password.

Rats.

So I will give you the flavor of each and you can decide whether to pick up the magazine (library or purchase) or go straight to the website and subscribe, and then I'm off to church.

1. "Excited by the way in which television appeared to expose the viewer to different and simultaneous lives, Ballard came to see the box as a primary source of numbness and disorientation. He was featured in a number of documentary films for the BBC, and yet he apppears to have thought that such films were just another means of falsifying reality."


2. "He was singular for having a transatlantic career, or two separate careers, in the Old World and then in the New, and he might be said to have blazed a trail followed since by other English journalists, not least by showing how susceptible Americans can be to a certain kind of insolent swagger and the affectation of superior learning ... Presenting himself as a champion of true conservatism against the decayed American version, Fairlie picked fights with William F. Buckley and George F. Will, and he derided Ronald Reagan as a 'slippered pantaloon.'"

Enjoy your coffee!

Rediscovery

A few people have linked to Dave Hingsburger's blog, and I thought his style sounded vaguely familiar, so I went hunting around and turned up a link from March. So he's now on the blogroll, and I just wanted to link to one of his other posts because I like him as a writer.