Another criminal

One of the biggest war criminals of the second half of the 20^th Century has been caught—after only 16 years of hiding out in his native Serbia. Ratko Mladic has been arrested by Serb forces & is being held pending extradition to the UN tribunal at The Hague, where his political master, Radovan Karadzic, is currently defending charges of crimes against humanity.

Mladic, a Bosnian Serb, is evidently in very poor health & is probably looking forward to the medical care he’ll get while awaiting trial—care he wouldn’t have had access to in his village hideout.

Mladic was the commander of Serb forces that invaded Bosnia in the 90s following the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Working with Karadzic he crafted & executed a policy that brought us the term “ethnic cleansing”; their goal was to eradicate any non-Serbs in territory the Serbs deemed Serbian. Kind of like a south Slav version of lebensraum. The massacre at Srebrenica was only the largest & most appalling of their crimes.

It was a policy that the entire nation carried out with vigor & relish. In many quarters both Mladic & Karadzic are still considered Serbian heroes, unfairly & falsely vilified by a world that doesn’t understand the rightful place of Serbs & their destiny as a people.

That attitude partly explains why it’s taken so bloody long to take Mladic into custody; the Serbian government didn’t really put a whole lot of effort into the search. Like the Pakistanis being shocked—shocked, I say—to discover Osama Bin Laden living in their midst for years & years, I have no doubt that the Serbs & their government have been well aware of the criminals among them & were just disinclined to grab them up.

It’s only because they want to join the EU, & failing to turn over Mladic is an insurmountable barrier to that goal, that they’ve suddenly discovered where he’s been.

In many ways, the Serbs are like the Germans of 1944-45: they don’t believe they or their government did anything wrong in their quest to subsume formerly Yugoslavian territory into their idea of empire. They’re not at all sorry they went to war; they’re sorry they weren’t successful & they’re sullen that there’ve been some negative consequences.

I’m glad they’ve finally caught the bastard & that he’ll be in the dock in The Hague. Too often it’s only the little fish that are brought to justice. Mladic is a whacking great shark, even if his teeth are rotting & he’s utterly unrepentant, & he should be brought to justice, regardless of the delay.

We have a situation here

The Internet is a strange land. Well, perhaps more specifically, the web-based social networking phenomenon is a really strange land.

I’ve already commented on the wag or wags who grafted Princess Beatrice’s Royal Wedding millinery confection onto the heads of the men and women in the White House Situation Room watching the raid on Abbottabad.

But it seems that the Sit Room pic has spawned a life of its own. At the beginning, a Hasidic newspaper in Brooklyn removed Hillary Clinton and Audrey Tomason from the photo, because their editorial policy is to not show women, as they might be too suggestive, even fully—even frumpily—clothed.

Well, whatever. Although I’m not sure I’d trust a publication that Photoshops the pix it publishes to not also manipulate the reports as well. But that’s probably not the point for religiously-focused news outlets. Or Fox news, now that I think of it.

(I’m sure even mainstream newspapers crop photos; but electronically altering them is really beyond the beyond.)

But there’s obviously something about this photo that has inspired anyone with a graphics application, a sense of humor and too much time on his hands to dress it up. See for yourself.

Zoo news

I dunno about the Bronx Zoo—it seems to have a real problem keeping the inmates, er, in.

You’ll recall that a young Egyptian cobra disappeared for a while back in March. According to BronxZoosCobra on Twitter, the snake enjoyed a few days out on the town before being recovered, recaged and eventually named Mia (as in Missing In Action).

You can believe the zoo’s official story, that the cobra never got out of the reptile house. I prefer the tweeted version.

But word came this past week that a peahen also flew the coop on the 9^th. She was captured after only a couple of days, but then she was obviously strutting a lot more than the cobra.

Naturally, she signed up for Twitter, but I’m not finding her tweets nearly as amusing as Mia’s. Also, she seems confused as to sexual identity, since her nom-de-tweet is BronxZooPeacock.

Her adventure ended rather mundanely, as she was captured by the owner of an auto glass repair shop about a mile from the zoo. At least the cobra made it to a Yankees game.


Plus, frankly, the Twitter peahen is only partially armed to engage in a battle of wits, if you catch my drift.

Still—what I’m wondering is what’s up with that zoo? I mean, is it that the chow sucks or they’ve cut back on the workers for the poop patrol? Perhaps we’ll see a mass breakout, followed by a movie by Pixar.

Down in the easy chair

They say that if you can remember the 60s you weren’t there. Well, maybe. But if there’s one quintessential icon of my youth, it has to be Bob Dylan. Or at least, his music. Again and again, in his songs Dylan defined the turmoil of the 60s.

And today Bob Dylan turns 70. It’s hard to believe; in fact, it somehow doesn’t seem right. He was all about us against them, youth against age, ideals against corruption. There can’t be anything more scathing than “Masters of War” or “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”. Despair, disenfranchisement, disillusionment—he caught those elements and hammered them home.

Dylan broke the mold—he wrote popular songs about issues of the day, a major break from things like “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”. Yes, there were other topical songwriters (Tom Lehrer, say); but Dylan broke out to the wider audience. Maybe it’s because he was visceral where Lehrer was intellectual.

If there’s anything that encapsulates the 60s, it has to be “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.

“Come senators, congressmen

“Please heed the call

“Don’t stand in the doorway

“Don’t block up the hall

“For he that gets hurt

“Will be he who has stalled

“There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’

“It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls

“For the times they are a-changin’.”

(Sadly, senators and congressmorons are deafer than ever; the only calls they heed are from corporate donors and lobbyists.)

Or “Mr. Tambourine Man”. “In that jingle-jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.”

In a way, it seems so wrong that I’m finding a collection of celebrity tributes to Dylan in, of all places, AARP, although he is, after all, 70. The Telegraph has reviewed several books on him. & Rolling Stone has done him proud.

Speaking of which, it was Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” that gave both the publication & the band their name.

I have a lot of the songs on different playlists, so I’m frequently reminded of his talent for saying the most with the fewest words. Things like “My Back Pages” still resonate. Is there anything truer than the refrain, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

And “I Shall Be Released” saw me through the past three years, especially the way Nina sings it.

Well, hell—there are scores I could go on about. But I’ll just mention two more:

The very anthem of the era has to be “Blowin’ in the Wind”. Three verses, four chords on the guitar, yet so powerful, so universal & so timely. Even now, nearly 50 years later. I’ll give you two versions—one by The Boss and one by Peter, Paul & Mary. They can’t have done a concert that didn’t end with it in all the years they were together.

Lastly, I wish this for Dylan and those who grew up with him: may you stay forever young.

Un-raptured

Something occurred to me over the weekend that 200 million people weren’t subsumed into heaven (at least that I know about): Harold Camping has twice predicted the end of days based on his mathematical calculations. And he’s two for two.

But he was trained and practiced as a civil engineer for many years. Shouldn’t someone be rechecking his jobs to make sure he didn’t miscalculate any compressive tension estimates on bridges or buildings? Or shouldn’t we at least be told what construction projects he worked on so we can avoid them?