Sign of the times

A year and a half after the entrance sign to Auschwitz was stolen and cut into pieces, authorities have decided not to restore it to its outside location. They’re going to keep it in an exhibition hall.

It’s bizarre that resources are being expended to protect that particular sign, given that the tens of thousands of the camp’s inmates must have prayed for its complete destruction. Except, of course, that it’s imperative that the generations of the future should see it and understand what happens when common citizens allow governments to do all their thinking for them.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it

The E. coli outbreak in Europe is serious business—a food-borne illness that so far has struck down 1150 people and killed more than 15. And apparently the spinning wheel of blame has stopped with the pointer aimed at cucumbers from Spain.

Spaniards, however, are having none of it. They’re demanding to know what makes their agriculture methods culpable when who knows what those vegetables picked up in transit between Spain and Northern Europe.

Now what I find really intriguing is the image of the Andalucian minister of agriculture defiantly eating a cucumber to demonstrate her confidence in the complete healthfulness of the veg. (I’m not even going to touch the Freudian possibilities in this image.)

This is so reminiscent of the 1990 photo of Tory agriculture minister John Gummer cheerfully chowing down on a British beef hamburger to prove that the whole Mad Cow thing was just a load of old cobbers.

You’ll notice, however, that Gummer got his four-year-old daughter into the act: he’s holding a burger for her to eat because her hands are too small to grasp it on her own. Both give the appearance that there’s nothing they’d rather eat than these sandwiches, because there’s nothing—absolutely nothing, I say—questionable, much less lethal, about British beef, so everyone should tuck in.

What I always wondered was how many armed guards it took to keep Gummer’s wife from ripping that burger out of her daughter’s hand and ramming it up her husband’s nose, all the while screaming imprecations at him for putting the girl at risk for a bloody photo op? Because there’s no mother in the universe who would put her child in harm’s way for the sake of a political statement.

The Spanish minister, of course, is only risking her own health, and it’s her job to do whatever she can to promote the image of Spanish agriculture, which has taken a severe beating in the wake of the E. coli outbreak. But I’m wondering if she’s feeling any little twinges in her tummy.

Treeful of ego

Poor Larry Ellison—the founder of Oracle, whose ego is as big as his fortune, is at loggerheads (so to speak) with his neighbors in an upscale San Francisco enclave. It’s all about trees.

That Ellison, who suffers from Bill Gates envy, would go ballistic over trees that existed on the neighbors’ property when he bought his own doesn’t really surprise me. & I guess I shouldn’t find it novel that there apparently are lawyers who specialize in “tree law”. Especially in California.

Evidently Ellison is revving up for the America’s Cup in 2013; wants to have unobstructed views for the full-bore preening he plans to do.

I know he will, too. Back when I was working for Oracle, there was a story on the intranet about a contest of some sort that had been held at company HQ in Redwood Shores, Calif. The winners (& I swear I am not making this up) “got” to go down to the bay & watch Ellison’s racing yacht sail about. From the shore.

They weren’t even allowed aboard. Or given so much as a Diet Coke by way of refreshment.

And; then they had to write about what a great experience it was.

I’m not particularly sympathetic to Ellison’s position in this dispute.His ego could use a lot more trimming than those trees.

Memorial Day 2011

On this Memorial Day I’m remembering the victims of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Given the capture last week of Ratko Mladic, commander of Bosnian Serb forces during that time, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Croats, Bosnians, Kosovans, Slovenes and others whom Mladic and his crowd tortured, raped and murdered in their quest to build a greater Serbia.

Not a particular surprise: Mladic has denied any role in the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, according to his son. And, also unsurprisingly, supporters of Mladic rioted in Belgrade Sunday, outraged at his apprehension and also proclaiming he did nothing criminal.

Were there no other reason to remember the victims of the late 20^th Century Balkan wars, these grotesque denials would make it obligatory. Do a Google Image search on Srebrenica and look at the results, if you have the stomach. This is just one.

Then there’s the siege of Sarajevo. And Kosovo. And all the others.

General Michael Rose led the UN forces there and I well recall seeing his face the day he turned over his command. He looked ill, pain emanating from his eyes—like like he’d just got back from Hell and wasn’t convinced it wasn’t coming with him. The UN “peacekeeping” mission there was nearly useless in the face of political restrictions and Serbian willingness to violate any convention of warfare.

I own Fighting for Peace, Rose’s account of that mission; but I haven’t had the strength to pick it up and read it. I know it’s going to be hard for even me to get through.

(Ditto General Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil. Dallaire’s mission in Rwanda in the 90s was remarkably like that of Rose’s. But Rwanda is another post.)

As you go about your Monday holiday, thinking about the official start of summer, painting the garage or perhaps even decorating the grave of a loved one, have a care for those whose lives were ended or ruined by the Serb wars. And hope for justice yet.

Missing Liane

After 20 years at the helm of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, Liane Hansen is hanging up the microphone. Today is her last show.

I don’t know what I’m going to do—she’s become an integral part of my Sunday mornings, the way Susan Stamberg was before her. She’s broken plenty of big stories on her show, but what has endeared her to me is her unalloyed interest in the stories and people she has covered. That is a reflection of her character, her talent and her professionalism.

Here’s an NPR olio of Hansen’s work—listen to one or two of the early stories and then to the most recent. You can hear how she’s matured in the timbre of her voice. She sounds like a beautiful cello—warm and with a dynamic range that’s really impressive.

Her replacement, Audie Cornish, has been a stand-in for Hansen in the past year. Whenever Cornish was on the air I couldn’t wait for Hansen to return. I’ll have to get used to her; and in the spirit of Hansen’s willingness to delve into new things, I’ll give it my best shot.

But Liane—I miss you already.

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?