A brief light piercing through this week’s usual complement of dreary news: Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been released from more than seven years of house arrest.
House arrest was only the latest of the restrictions levied on Suu Kyi. She was separated from her husband and sons for more than two decades—they lived in Britain and if she visited them there was a good chance that she’d have been refused return to Myanmar. The junta even denied her husband permission to visit her when he was dying eleven years ago.
Of course, you never know with dictatorships whether a decision will be reversed in the next five minutes. And you definitely know that this woman isn’t going to veer from the course she’s held for more than 25 years, resisting the military dictators and working to bring democracy to her country.
So it’s not the beginning of the end. But it’s a lovely end to this week in November to think that she’s able to walk around her neighborhood and share a cup of tea with a friend.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
The bishops' strife
Well, I just almost don’t know what to say: it seems three sitting and two retired Anglican bishops are jumping ship because the Church of England has decided to move ahead with ordaining women priests and consecrating women bishops.
Evidently Pope Benedict XVI is happy to welcome them, married though they be, into the fold. After all, he’s been having a bit of pother over the failed cover-up of pedophile priests. Probably five white middle-aged guys who’ve managed monogamy are looking pretty good about now.
According to the Telegraph, the Right Reverend Andrew Burnham, Bishop of Ebbsfleet, compared the CoE to a chain of “failing coffeeshops” that doesn’t maintain consistent product offerings across its franchises.
“The Church of England has decided that it can make its own mind up about what it can do. There are signs it is forgetting and losing a sense of where it came from,” Burnham is quoted as averring.
According to a statement released by the Fab Five, this range of ecclesiastic products, including new approaches to women, gays & who knows what-all, “is incompatible with the historic vocation of Anglicanism and the tradition of the church for nearly 2,000 years.”
Now, I only know what I read in the papers, & I’m certainly not a theologian, but I find it just choice that leaders of a sect established to satisfy the sexual & dynastic appetites (and fill the coffers) of Henry VIII should suddenly be shocked, utterly shocked, that the church has the unmitigated gall to move into the 21st Century.
These are leaders who recognize the reigning monarch of Britain as the head of their church as God’s representative, & have conveniently neglected to mention that this particular tradition only goes back 500 years.
As near as I can tell, they don’t like the way the match has gone, so they’re picking up their balls & going home.
Or, as the Brits would say, tossing their toys out of the pram.
I don’t know which is sadder: them for being in such a snit or Benedict for being so grateful to have them.
Evidently Pope Benedict XVI is happy to welcome them, married though they be, into the fold. After all, he’s been having a bit of pother over the failed cover-up of pedophile priests. Probably five white middle-aged guys who’ve managed monogamy are looking pretty good about now.
According to the Telegraph, the Right Reverend Andrew Burnham, Bishop of Ebbsfleet, compared the CoE to a chain of “failing coffeeshops” that doesn’t maintain consistent product offerings across its franchises.
“The Church of England has decided that it can make its own mind up about what it can do. There are signs it is forgetting and losing a sense of where it came from,” Burnham is quoted as averring.
According to a statement released by the Fab Five, this range of ecclesiastic products, including new approaches to women, gays & who knows what-all, “is incompatible with the historic vocation of Anglicanism and the tradition of the church for nearly 2,000 years.”
Now, I only know what I read in the papers, & I’m certainly not a theologian, but I find it just choice that leaders of a sect established to satisfy the sexual & dynastic appetites (and fill the coffers) of Henry VIII should suddenly be shocked, utterly shocked, that the church has the unmitigated gall to move into the 21st Century.
These are leaders who recognize the reigning monarch of Britain as the head of their church as God’s representative, & have conveniently neglected to mention that this particular tradition only goes back 500 years.
As near as I can tell, they don’t like the way the match has gone, so they’re picking up their balls & going home.
Or, as the Brits would say, tossing their toys out of the pram.
I don’t know which is sadder: them for being in such a snit or Benedict for being so grateful to have them.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Eleven eleven eleven
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, an armistice went into effect between the armed forces of the Central Powers and those of the Allied Nations. And thus ended, not with a bang but a whimper, the worst systematic slaughter the world had seen up until that time.
From August 1914 until November 1918 around 8.5 million soldiers of the various armies and navies were killed, and another 21 million wounded. Maybe six million civilians were killed and I don’t have figures for further collateral damage.
I’m also not counting the death toll from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, or the Russian Civil War, both of which are related to the conflagration.
World War I was one of those appalling confluences of technology, politics, idiocy and willful refusal by those in positions of power to view the world as it really was and not as they expected or wanted it to be. Among the worst offenders were the military commanders, the generals, the field marshals, the planners & the strategists.
What they essentially ignored was the fact that the invention and implementation of the machine gun gave the tactical advantage to the defensive, and that the frontal charge, even by mobile troops like cavalry, simply couldn’t work against entrenched forces with this new technology.
Every time I revisit this war, in books, in film or TV or on the battlefields, I’m poleaxed all over again at the utter blindness and criminal stubbornness of the professionals whose business it was to send men into battle for a purpose (to win battles, gain territory, destroy enemy armies, ,bring about some change). Because again and again they proved Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over & over again, expecting different results.
And, frankly, it’s not like they didn’t see it coming. There were European military observers at many of the battles of the US War Between the States, when the prototypical use of entrenchments and rapid fire indicated things to come. And at the battle of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, western military observers practically outnumbered the combatants and saw first-hand what happens when infantry charges machine gun emplacements. (Among the observers were Ian Hamilton, later to command the British debacle at Gallipoli; John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force; and Douglas MacArthur. Don’t get me started on MacArthur.)
The First World War is a nightmare of pitched battles and wholesale slaughter, repeated again and again throughout a four-year night. It exhausted nations, natural resources, gene pools and national political and moral fiber. It left a legacy of open wounds, disillusion, broken dreams and broken faith, and I don’t think we’ve fully recovered from it 92 years on.
The problem is, in my view, that we haven’t really learned from it, although we’ve been paying for it all along. Old men were too traumatized by 1914-18 to step up to the plate in 1933 in Manchuria or 1938 in Munich to scotch the snake (which by then was armed with 20 years of improved weaponry, like tanks and tactical fighter-bombers; as well as ideologies that would have wilted the moustaches of Wilhelm II or Franz Josef I). Willfully blind to the realities of Stalin’s rule, western leaders gave away the farm in Eastern Europe, and then gathered to their bosom surviving Nazis to help fight the Cold War. (And, 65 years beyond that, now we have technologies including satellite navigation, handheld missile launchers, dirty bombs, assault rifles and mass communications undreamt of 100 years ago. And nuclear devices.)
And then there’s the situation in the Balkans and Middle East. All the result of or exacerbated by that Great War, and all living on beyond the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.
You notice I’m short on any answers to these situations. Me—I start by remembering.
From August 1914 until November 1918 around 8.5 million soldiers of the various armies and navies were killed, and another 21 million wounded. Maybe six million civilians were killed and I don’t have figures for further collateral damage.
I’m also not counting the death toll from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, or the Russian Civil War, both of which are related to the conflagration.
World War I was one of those appalling confluences of technology, politics, idiocy and willful refusal by those in positions of power to view the world as it really was and not as they expected or wanted it to be. Among the worst offenders were the military commanders, the generals, the field marshals, the planners & the strategists.
What they essentially ignored was the fact that the invention and implementation of the machine gun gave the tactical advantage to the defensive, and that the frontal charge, even by mobile troops like cavalry, simply couldn’t work against entrenched forces with this new technology.
Every time I revisit this war, in books, in film or TV or on the battlefields, I’m poleaxed all over again at the utter blindness and criminal stubbornness of the professionals whose business it was to send men into battle for a purpose (to win battles, gain territory, destroy enemy armies, ,bring about some change). Because again and again they proved Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over & over again, expecting different results.
And, frankly, it’s not like they didn’t see it coming. There were European military observers at many of the battles of the US War Between the States, when the prototypical use of entrenchments and rapid fire indicated things to come. And at the battle of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, western military observers practically outnumbered the combatants and saw first-hand what happens when infantry charges machine gun emplacements. (Among the observers were Ian Hamilton, later to command the British debacle at Gallipoli; John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force; and Douglas MacArthur. Don’t get me started on MacArthur.)
The First World War is a nightmare of pitched battles and wholesale slaughter, repeated again and again throughout a four-year night. It exhausted nations, natural resources, gene pools and national political and moral fiber. It left a legacy of open wounds, disillusion, broken dreams and broken faith, and I don’t think we’ve fully recovered from it 92 years on.
The problem is, in my view, that we haven’t really learned from it, although we’ve been paying for it all along. Old men were too traumatized by 1914-18 to step up to the plate in 1933 in Manchuria or 1938 in Munich to scotch the snake (which by then was armed with 20 years of improved weaponry, like tanks and tactical fighter-bombers; as well as ideologies that would have wilted the moustaches of Wilhelm II or Franz Josef I). Willfully blind to the realities of Stalin’s rule, western leaders gave away the farm in Eastern Europe, and then gathered to their bosom surviving Nazis to help fight the Cold War. (And, 65 years beyond that, now we have technologies including satellite navigation, handheld missile launchers, dirty bombs, assault rifles and mass communications undreamt of 100 years ago. And nuclear devices.)
And then there’s the situation in the Balkans and Middle East. All the result of or exacerbated by that Great War, and all living on beyond the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.
You notice I’m short on any answers to these situations. Me—I start by remembering.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
How's your drink?
I’m so glad I’m no longer in Washington state. In the space of a week Evergreen voters rejected two ballot measures that would have removed the state government’s monopoly on the sale of liquor to the public, & the State Liquor Board has banned the sale of alcoholic energy drinks.
I don’t get either—except that they’re both indicators that the population that considers themselves the vortex of intellectual activity also clearly thinks that Government Knows Best, & that the intellectual achievers are too stupid to make rational choices about booze.
But the energy drink thing just doesn’t make sense. Apparently if you want to buy a Red Bull & vodka you’re jake; or if you order up a Colt 45, no problem; if you want a caffeinated alcopop you’ll have to go to Idaho.
Really—you just can't make this stuff up.
I don’t get either—except that they’re both indicators that the population that considers themselves the vortex of intellectual activity also clearly thinks that Government Knows Best, & that the intellectual achievers are too stupid to make rational choices about booze.
But the energy drink thing just doesn’t make sense. Apparently if you want to buy a Red Bull & vodka you’re jake; or if you order up a Colt 45, no problem; if you want a caffeinated alcopop you’ll have to go to Idaho.
Really—you just can't make this stuff up.
Monday, November 8, 2010
The hamster connection
Scott Adams has once again slammed his analytic hammer on the goutish toe of modern business: hamster-brained sociopaths in corporate management are necessary to the health of the economy.
Not for the corporations they suck the life out of, but for making life in the collective so futile & so miserable that the best & brightest employees realize that they’ve hit what Adams calls the “manure ceiling” & they leave in droves.
I really can’t improve on his analysis.
Not for the corporations they suck the life out of, but for making life in the collective so futile & so miserable that the best & brightest employees realize that they’ve hit what Adams calls the “manure ceiling” & they leave in droves.
I really can’t improve on his analysis.
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