By now you've probably figured out that there's no Friday Quiz this week. We're all in Missouri, on a last-minute family visit after the recent death of Theresa's stepfather. We're doing fine, thanks for asking.
A few ill-sorted thoughts formed over the last couple of days:
1. Airlines are, more or less, completely evil, credit-card "miles" are worse than useless in the case of emergency need, and "compassion" fares are anything but compassionate.
2. A child soundly sleeping in an airplane seat is perhaps the most beautiful thing in the world, the sight of which makes the screaming of someone else's toddler seven or eight rows away the cause for a deliciously guilty wave of schadenfreude.
3. The playground-design community is obviously filled with disciples of James Watt, the former Reagan cabinet official who insisted that trees cause pollution. The more innovative and interesting the playground, the more likely that it and its immediate environs will have been denuded of all tree life, exposed maximally to the prairie sun. These people will only rest when the entire American continent is covered with hi-tech jungle gyms and beautifully landscaped sandboxes, superheated to a flesh-frying crisp by a perpetual sun.
4. It is not entirely reassuring to read the sign at the playground which explains that concealed weapons are not, in that particular place, permitted.
5. It is entirely happy-making to show your daughter a mother deer and her sweetly dappled baby trotting through Grandma's backyard.
Back in the home office on Sunday. A double quiz will be posted next week to make up.
After reading this Washington Post article, you'll probably want to get to know a little more about Chad.
The article in question suggests that we could all do with a little update:
They landed in Chad with outdated U.S. military maps that still labeled the current capital, N'Djamena, with its French colonial name, Fort Lamy. To keep from getting lost, Gary fashioned his own crude map by plotting GPS coordinates for stores and gas stations. U.S. soldiers are relative newcomers in Chad, where France has had 1,000 troops and three air bases.
Whatever it's called, apparently the local culture leaves something to be desired, too:
After scouting out the cacophonous, crime-ridden capital, with its Internet cafes and dilapidated French cinemas, the soldiers concluded that it was ripe for terrorists. Worshipers outside the grand mosque denounced the war in Iraq. Booksellers sold Islamic fundamentalist tracts and photocopied images of a girl transformed into a large rat because she threw a Koran, the Islamic holy book, on the floor.
Cacaphonous and crime-ridden? That's not what my Lonely Planet guide says! Oh, well. Anyhow, the training of Chadean anti-terrorist troops is running into predictable obstacles -- including language barriers, fewer than usual Special Forces doing the training, and the proportion of Chadean soldiers who are, well, really poor (as in "train in flip-flops" poor) and really, really young (as in "just old enough to attend a PG-13 film unsupervised" young).
And then there's this:
Grooming effective military leaders is as central to the U.S. mission in Chad as teaching infantry tactics, U.S. officials say. But the job is complicated because Chad's army -- like the rest of the government -- is run top-down by the feared Zagawa tribe.
Indeed, many of the U.S. goals in Chad appear to conflict with the Zagawa leaders' imperative to stay in power. Across the region, some of the governments the U.S. military is working with have embraced counterterrorism as a way to stifle legitimate dissent and Muslim groups, according to reports issued by the International Crisis Group.
The U.S.-trained battalion is commanded by Deby's nephew, Maj. Hardja Idriss, and is part of a regiment assigned to protect an authoritarian and increasingly unpopular president. Deby survived an attempted coup last year, and his grip on power remains fragile. "It just makes sense. They're the president's guard, and so in this region, with all the coups and stuff, you'd want them the best trained," said Capt. Jason, the team leader.
The astute-ness over at Dr. Green's log continues with his notation of
Michael Hiltzik's article in the Washington Monthly, in which the thesis is that the Rove/Plame flap reflects particularly badly on a D.C. press community that priviliges its own access -- and pursues access by granting administration officials confidentiality, willy-nilly. It's no wonder, Hiltzik says, that reporters get spun by the likes of Rove, if they are routinely allowing the president's No. 1 pol the means to direct the story without attribution and total "I-can't-reveal-my-source" cover.
A little (and illuminating) pronoun problem creeps up in the piece. I'm always hesitant to blame the "elitist" media for the manifest sins of the administration. One of the reader comments made to the online edition of Hiltzik's article takes issue with Hiltzik's point that reporters should expect someone like Karl Rove to manipulate them:
And should we be appalled and surprised that Rove used the occasion to mislead? To paraphrase George Orwell, you can’t blame Rove for taking such an opportunity to further his own interests, any more than you can blame a skunk for stinking.
Commentor "Russel" chides Hiltzik for his acceptance of Rove's perfidy as natural, and wants to re-focus on the charge that Rove "compromised the national security of the U.S." That, he says is "the ball" that we should all have our eye on -- issues of press habits are secondary.
I don't think I need to spend time here defending Hiltzik, but as I re-read, trying to grasp whether or not the commentor had a legit point (I do balk when the meta-analysis of political misbehavior threatens to push the original sin into the background), I realized that there's a revealing gap here.
In the passage above, Hiltzik is speaking to a (presumably media-centric) audience who already buy the argument that the administration are essentially Machiavellian political actors. By this I mean: cynically interested only in maximizing their own political gain. Hiltzik doesn't pause to worry over the "national security" question, since he believes (and believes his audience understands) that the niceties of this law are beside the point: a Rove will do whatever a Rove will do. He will escape the boundaries of the law whenever possible in pursuit of political gain.
Whether Hiltzik believes this of all administrations or merely this one is a good question, and one I'll admit I can't deduce from his language here. But I suspect he'd say the same about a canny left-wing political strategist. My point is that his "we" and "you" in the passage above are a perceived audience of press folks and others who think or feel "inside" about the struggles between the administration and the press.
The commentor is bothered by this -- the whole thing sounds to him like giving ground. Hold Rove to the law! he says. There's a note here of outrage less at Rove than at the (real or perceived) Washington culture of political cynicism that expects it all to be about power.
He reads the "you" and the "we" to refer to Americans on the whole, and is consequently shocked at the notion that we should be so jaded about what the White House will and won't do. And even though I think that his focus on national security is not the most important thing here (it's a legal point, yes. The larger issue is that the White House was very underhandedly smearing a knowledgeable critic of their go-to-war plan) , there's an implication in his response with which I sympathize.
Not to say I agree with it, exactly, because it's not quite an argument. Hiltzik is making the point that we shouldn't let the press off the hook here because their bad use of confidentiality leads to results like this one. Where I'm interested is in the gap between his cynicism about Rove's intent, and the broader public's idea about what we can or should expect from political leadership. This may be a case of our speaking so much about the metatext (how reporters get their stories) that the text (Rove smearing Wilson) threatens to disappear.
In Hiltzik's professional world, of course, you're expected to be able to talk about both without losing sight of either. For the rest of us -- especially in the age of information overload -- that's a tougher task. Are we the professionally cynical "we" who coolly view Rove as a player for power? Or a civic "we" who necessarily approach our for-better-or-for-worse elected government in the spirit of openness, of wanting to believe what they say until proven otherwise, of wanting to craft and refine (or dispense with) laws in pursuit of what we believe is an equitable balance of interests?
My suggestion is that we are pretty damn confused about this. Or mabe it's just me.
There's been precious little in the file of late, we know. We've blamed Oprah and Harry Potter, we've blamed the demands of parenthood, we've railed against vague computer troubles and the bastards at G--way, we've pointed the finger at governmental over-regulation of America's herbal-supplement industry (Well, we've never actually done that. But we think it's implicit in everything we do and say here.)
We wanted to write this week about the possibly heat-induced wave of anti-blog nuttiness, a subject now suitably hashed-over on the Internets.
Or maybe about Allawi's "walking-around money" or the emerging problems with the Iraqi "Ready in minutes!" constitution?
But we didn't. And all we can say is that we hope this miserable lack of nonsensical blather over here at the home office will cease.
Right after we get back from out of town...yes, the newly combustion-engine-enabled editorial staff is once again scampering out of Gotham for a couple of days. We'll be thinking about all of you with appropriately fraternal tenderness, as we spend a little time in the City of Brotherly Love.
Meanwhile, a little quizlet to chew on while we're gone. We may not be able to check in from the road, but on Sunday we'll view the battlefield.
He was born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund on October 7, 1879. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1902. He was executed in 1915. He is known by the much shorter name he eventually went by, and immortalized in song.
What four-word phrase did he coin, which passed into the common lexicon and became an oft-deployed cliche?
First correct answer posted to comments wins an ottoman constructed entirely from unwanted Hold Everything catalogs. No Googling or inventing a new, better-than-Google search engine for the purpose of better-than-Googling the answer. One guess per comment, but you may comment as often as you like.
As Pottermania comes to its crisis-point, a professionally distracted Wombat tosses out this squib of a quiz-question and promises to check in from time to time on the guessing...
In the the Amazonian jungle, he watched his son nearly killed when his canoe swept over a waterfall. He was nearly killed himself by flesh-eating bacteria. He saw a monkey's arm removed from the gullet of an enormous catfish. When one of his guides shot another, he helped in the burial of the slain man and called for the guilty party to be hunted down and killed in turn ("He who kills must die," he reportedly said. "That's the way it is in my country.") Of the experience, he wrote, "The very pathetic myth of 'beneficent nature' could not deceive even the least wise being if he once saw for himself the iron cruelty of life in the tropics." He died five years after his return from the jungle.
Who was he?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a box of Dead Sea Salt ("The Salt-Lover's Sea Salt"). No Googling or consulting Mentor. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.
Before we get onto today's quiz, we want to say that if you have loved ones or friends in London, that we hope they're safe, and if you've had cause to be worried over the last twenty-four hours, we hope that's past.
On to a completely coincidentally U.K.-related quiz question.
Queen Elizabeth II of England has a distant cousin who happens to be the political leader of another nation (although this is going to change soon). What country is it? Bonus point: what was his title from the ages of 6 to 9? Bonus bonus point: who was his father eating with just before (the father) died suspiciously?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a whole box of burnt-out flourescent light bulbs, perfect for hurling into the dumpster out back, javelin-style, where they make satisfying explosions. No Googling or leafing through Burke's Peerage. One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.
I hope I'm not boring you with these "chucklers" from the Times. Here's a tidbit from today's puffball of a profile of Comedy Central's new featured lout...
In the opening monologue on tonight's show Mr. Mencia jokes that Middle Eastern people stopped at airport security checkpoints have gotten off relatively easy compared with the trials other minorities in America have had to endure. Mr. Mencia, who has an intense delivery style reminiscent of Samuel L. Jackson's, remained unapologetic when asked if his material was too harsh on those of Middle Eastern descent, potentially fanning the embers of intolerance. "If the worst thing happening to Middle Eastern people is that Carlos Mencia is doing a joke about them being stopped at airports, that's a pretty awesome state of affairs," he said. "When's the last time you heard about a Middle Eastern person being beaten to death?"
I guess he's got a point. It's been a long time -- almost a year.
(Unless, of course, you count Middle-Easterner-on-Middle-Easterner beatings. Then, well...)
Researchers have little sense yet of how these differences may affect behavior, or sexual identity. In the mid-1990's, Dr. Diamond recruited a group of 90 women at gay pride parades, academic conferences on gender issues and other venues. About half of the women called themselves lesbians, a third identified as bisexual and the rest claimed no sexual orientation. In follow-up interviews over the last 10 years, Dr. Diamond has found that most of these women have had relationships both with men and women.(Emphasis is, of course, all ours.)
"Most of them seem to lean one way or the other, but that doesn't preclude them from having a relationship with the nonpreferred sex," she said. "You may be mostly interested in women but, hey, the guy who delivers the pizza is really hot, and what are you going to do?"
In its waning minutes, the Wombat File staff mark this anniversary of our for-better-or-for-worse country's birthday with nothing special -- a notation that like many other hoary institutions that are often mourned these days, decent journalism and, indeed, magazines, still have a little kick left in them.
Hence, among the many excellent things that cannot (yet) be found on the Web: Jack Hitt's "Mighty White of You," which graces the July 2005 issue of Harper's. It's a look at the archaeological controversy around "Kennewick Man" and the fascinating -- and disturbing -- persistence of arguments about ancient peoples of "Caucasian" origin being the "first Americans."
(If you want something almost equally fascinating/disturbing (not new) of Mr. Hitt's that can be accessed through your computer, I might suggest Act One of this program.)
It's true, this non-link doesn't even have more than a seriously oblique relationship to the holiday on which we write. But we're really not up to the task of writing word one about the U.S. of A., it's heritage, or its probable future tonight. We're just happy to be back here, in whatever attenuated capacity, at all. More, as we keep saying, to come.
And yes: the Quiz will ride again.
