Given the title of this week’s World Beat, perhaps you expected an essay on North Korea or another vilified U.S. adversary and violator of all human decency.
Actually, I was referring to Jon Kyl. Those who dismiss the value of negotiating with North Korea insist that the country makes unreasonable demands, never has any intention of compromising, and violates any agreement that it ultimately signs. Funny, this sounds a lot like the hard-line Republicans in the last Congress.
When Ok Chin was a child, her mother brought her to an orphanage. The family was poor, and her mother heard that the girl would get fed and clothed. Ok Chin would get an education. Maybe if the family’s fortunes improved, she could rejoin her brothers and sisters.
What happened next was unexpected.
Terrorist plots are suddenly everywhere. In Baltimore last week, a 21-year-old construction worker tried to blow up a military recruitment center. In late November, federal law enforcement officials arrested a Somalia-born teenager for plotting to bomb a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. In October, a jury found the Newburgh Four guilty of planning to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx.
In all three cases, the major accomplice was not al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was the FBI.
WikiLeaks puts the government through a full body scanner to reveal many dirty secrets. U.S. officials, not surprisingly, have responded with anger. They don’t want their “junk” exposed or touched. No one, from emperors to excursionists, likes to be naked in public. And the latest revelations are the most intrusive yet.
“The Communists have taken over the World Bank!” So far, this phrase hasn’t appeared on Glenn Beck’s infamous chalkboard. I’m still waiting for Beck or Rush Limbaugh to make a big stink that the World Bank’s chief economist is from Mainland China. Justin Yifu Lin has been in his position for more than two years and the right-wing crazies have been largely silent. Maybe they’re too busy attacking their fantasy version of President Barack Obama – the Muslim/elitist/socialist-in-chief – to pay much attention to what’s going on in the real world.
They had to eat spam and Pop-Tarts. They had to shower in the dark with cold water. The toilets overflowed. When the Carnival Cruise ship finally docked in San Diego last week after three days on the high seas without electricity, CNN interviewed two of the youngest passengers in an attempt to play up the drama of the ordeal. Frankly, the kids didn’t look particularly discomfited by the 72-hour experience. They got bored playing board games. They didn’t like the smelly toilets. The cheese sandwiches really sucked. Still, if given another opportunity, they would go on a cruise again.
It’s a cold morning in January 2011. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Rand Paul (R-KY) wake up early to put on their Revolutionary War costumes. They’re joined by a miscellaneous group of anti-government protestors, libertarian activists, and all-around hotheads. With their supporters in tow, the tea party movement’s Adam and Eve drive to the Pentagon and use their congressional passes to get into the building. They proceed to the office of Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, where the Pentagon plans the future of the huge weapons systems that dominate military spending.
Even before the polls opened for voting in the U.S. midterm elections, the finger-pointing had already begun. The Obama agenda, instead of coming to term after four years, was suffering a miscarriage halfway through. The potential culprits were many and diverse.
What were NBC executives thinking? The unemployment rate remains near double digits, and many Americans have simply stopped looking for work. And what does the network premier this fall but a sitcom called Outsourced about an American manager sent to run a call center in India. The jokes revolve around funny names, unappetizing food, Sikh turbans, arranged marriages. “It’s hard to know what a normal smell is here and what isn’t,” says Todd Dempsy, the culturally insensitive manager played by Ben Rappaport, in last week’s “Touched by an Anglo” episode. And there’s indeed something fishy about a show that capitalizes on U.S. jobs going overseas during an economic downturn.
Writing about it didn’t, alas, prevent it from happening.
In the late 1940s, Gore Vidal lived in Guatemala, where he shared a house with the writer Anaïs Nin, lived on the cheap, and wrote Dark Green, Bright Red. Published in 1950, this undeservedly obscure novel describes how the operatives of the World Banana Company work behind the scenes in an unnamed Central American country to help a smooth-talking dictator depose a president committed to land reform and free elections.