Avuncular American

Ageless, Boundless Energy

Vicarious thrills, courtesy of friend Liam, pictured here with a dozen friends atop Machu Picchu (who got there hiking the 4 day Inca Trail, not your touristy train/bus ride).  It was, by the way, Liam's 67th birthday.

Yet another piece of evidence, if we needed any, of the increasingly elastic definition of - how can I put it? - "old."  Liam would probably shoot me if I used his name and that adjective in the same sentence.

I'm in Washington this week, attending the first board meeting of the foundation that just hired me - a spring chicken in my late fifties! - to head an institute in Morocco.  I'm thrilled.

In the 8 years since I retired from the US Foreign Service, all of my employment experiences have been with US-based organizations.  I mention this because the matter of retirement age, employment for seniors (or people older than the 35 that is sometimes listed as the outer age limit for EU jobs), and lifetime employment is seen differently in Europe.  85 year old baggers in supermarkets have not yet appeared in Europe.

Nor would I wish that on societies that generally appear to bequeath a right to a decent life to their elderly.

But Europe simply must find ways to emulate what appears to be a matter of course in the US: considering the resource that the recently-retired represent.  If you can schlep up Macchu Pichu, you can probably manage a program for an NGO.

The Right to Dry Atop Tangier

Tangier, Morocco is known for many things - commanding view of Gibraltar from the African side, birthplace of Tangerine traveler Ibn Battutah, as an "International Zone" from 1912 until Moroccan independence in 1956.  However, despite a very impressive wind power farm in the distant hills, it may not come to mind as a poster child for environmental awareness or alternative energy.  Until this:

My closeup taken on our host's rooftop does not do the scene justice.  Peer above the drying dishcloths and you'll see a sea of - antennas and satellite dishes, yes - laundry, flapping in the brisk breeze.  Tangier's outskirts might be sinking under the weight of all the concrete as it awakens from its decades-long torpor, but at least the inhabitants of the ancient medina are saving on clothes dryer electricity bills.

Stop for a moment.  Did you ever smell laundry dried outside by your mother or grandma?  Think back and sniff the freshness.  Tangier's laundry has it, because there they have the Right to Dry.

I was so busy thanking my lucky stars about being able to fly back to Europe through the volcano cloud that I let Earth Day pass without comment.  Before we left Morocco, local newspapers were already gearing up, with schoolchildren and civic groups preparing to plant trees.  Essential work there, where ancient trees are not safe from property developers.  Even business groups have sounded the alarm over the seemingly unending urban sprawl.

But back in the medina, the flapping of the sheets, the gurgling of the fountain in the courtyard, the distant throb of car ferry engines, the coast of Spain a reminder of Al-Andalus... for a while, you are taken back in time.  Some human activities don't require high fossil fuel consumption.  Just a little mint tea, as the sun sets over the Strait.

Earth Day is important, but it's what we do the Day(s) After Earth Day that is vital.

It's still not too late to plant that tree...

Splits, Belgian Style

This post was almost entitled Les fleurs du mal, but I couldn't associate these beautiful bluebells with anything negative.  The walk in the woods yesterday, in Halle - the "H" in BHV (of which more below) - was as usual devoid of politics, though as expected in this part of suburban territory southwest of Brussels (a.k.a. "B" in BHV), all the trail signs were in Dutch.  We have adopted a formula when encountering fellow hikers, who could either be Flemish or French-speakers (or maybe even other foreigners) - my wife says bonjour, and I say goeiedag, like the Aussi "G'day!"  A perfect example from the foreigners to the locals on how to use their unique linguistic situation to positive effect.

What, you might ask, is all this BHV stuff?  It's shorthand for a federal voting district, the only one remaining in Belgium that crosses linguistic lines.  Brussels, Halle, and Vilvoorde, which in almost any other country would simply be called "Greater ______" and here should be called "Metropolitan Brussels," remain stitched together in a throwback to the days when Belgium saw itself as a unified country.  The goal of most of the Dutch-speaking political class is to "split" (that's also the Dutch word) BHV, leaving the officially bilingual but mostly francophone Brussels even more of an island in Dutch-speaking Flanders.  The French-speakers see that as a dangerous step towards splitting the country (they call it scission, which does conjure up the word secession).  

Belgium does "splits" rather naturally, though the results are never as clean as log-splitting being prepared here in the Hallerbos.  We know a couple from neighboring Luxembourg who studied in the ancient University of Louvain when it was located in Leuven, a lovely Flemish town east of Brussels.

They were there in the Sixties, when Flemish nationalists succeeded in chasing the francophones away, who then proceeded to build Louvain-la-Neuve, a soulless concrete new town dedicated to housing the French half of the university.  Right down to the books.  Just think of Harvard's library, divided along, say, color lines: "green books stay here, red covers off to Cape Cod Community College."  Our friends and many others wept at the mindless sectarianism, which back then even included violence.

These days, the separatists appear to be using nitpicking linguistic laws rather than brute force, and the cumulative effect is probably as efficient.  Some francophones who would brave the linguistic divide in search of better housing or cheaper prices run up against laws that are written with linguistic purity in mind.  Some discriminative practices set up by the Flemish authorities have run afoul of the Council of Europe, the human rights watchdog, notably over the "Wooncode" which makes the needy pass a Dutch test to become eligible for social housing.

But how about the current political crisis, you ask?  Oh yes: last week a report on BHV triggered the resignation of the Prime Minister, which brings us full circle to summer 2007, when elections started a cycle of interim PM, interminable negotiations to form a coalition, Leterme I government, resignation and another governement, followed by Leterme II, followed by his second resignation...  I've actually left out a couple of resignations.

As Julian Stares says in today's London Observer, there's an apocryphal story about how British leaders "give their Belgian counterparts less time than others at EU summits because they know that within a year or two they'll be dealing with someone new."  That would certainly be true in the last three years.  Think of the economic cost to Belgium of this protracted political instability - would you invest here?

Belgian politicians, it would seem, abetted perhaps by a news media that gives inordinate amounts of coverage to the most obscure of quarrels over linguistic-regional issues, blithely ignore the toll their games are taking on the image of Belgium.  If anything, they should be worried about "Brand Brussels," which is the international hook that draws foreign investors and visitors.  But to many Flemish politicians, Brussels is a kind of Gomorrah of immigrants, crime, and French-speakers.  They don't like it, but they don't want it to leave their embrace.

At least we can go for a walk in the Flemish forest.  Goeiedag.

South of Europe's Volcanic Cloud

Al hamdulillah.  Thank God.  Thanks also to Royal Air Maroc, which got us back to Brussels yesterday from Tangier, just as Belgian air space was opening to allow a few flights to land.  Our flight from Morocco was on schedule, and the scene at Tangier's shiny new airport was a picture of calm.  We didn't realize how lucky we were - TV cameras were on hand at Brussels to record horror stories from travelers who had been stranded for days.  Whereas we were just returning on our planned day and flight.  Lucky us.

House guests in the medina of Tangier (of which more in a coming post), looking out onto the Strait of Gibraltar and across to Spain, we knew that we at least had options - ferry, train, bus - that the poor travelers stuck in airports did not.  But the feeling that the entire continent to the north, and the incessant flow of planes across the Atlantic, had come to an almost complete halt was eerie, a bit like the oppressive atmosphere of On The Beach, Nevil Shute's post apocalyptic novel turned into a classic film in 1959.

In On The Beach, the cloud of course is invisible nuclear fallout, and the refuge - only temporary, which gives book and especially film a sense of "après nous, le Déluge" - is Australia.  The rest of the Southern hemisphere has already succumbed to the radiation.

The eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano may be a natural phenomenon, but its effect on the airline industry and the rest of the world economy that is linked to this vital means of moving people and things has brought images of apocalypse to TV screens worldwide.  Whether it's your airmail letter delayed or misrouted, your rose farm in Kenya wilting in the sun, or your vacation plans ruined, the effect of this spewing spoiler is universal.  The AP has a good economic roundup.

Questions are already being raised - in a way that no amount of lecturing on air travel's effect on climate has done - over the viability of an economic model that can be grounded by almost invisible dust.  Great Britain's launching of Royal Navy ships to help repatriate its citizens has heroic echoes of Dunkirk, but the real long term solution to this vulnerability will be less photogenic.  More telecommuting, better rail/air regional hubs, and better coordination than a five day delay by European transport ministers in dialing up a conference call.

We're not yet "On the Beach," helplessly waiting for the cloud to descend upon us.  It is not, as the French title of the film goes, "Le Dernier Rivage."

Pause While Traveling

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be away for a conference and some meetings.  Blogging opportunities may be slim, so if I might suggest some interesting reading in the meantime:

• Whirled View's Patricia Lee Sharpe insight into why Karzai says "I might join the Taliban"
• John Waring (via Pat Lang) on "clericalism - the original sin of the Catholic Church"
• Michael Tomasky's blog on the Guardian website - a keen eye on US politics

There, that should be fine for a placeholder.  See you soon.

Race, Africa, and Terreblanche

Eugene Terreblanche, "whose very name highlighted the white supremacist's roots," according to the BBC obituary, was murdered this Easter weekend in South Africa.  As Nick Broomfield, who once made a documentary on the Afrikaner insurgent (His Big White Self), told the BBC, Terreblanche was "an unpleasant piece of work."

This is definitely a case of reap what you sow, what goes around comes around, and live by the sword, die by the sword.  The impending end of apartheid saw his AWB unleash terrorist bombings that might have gone the way of the OAS scorched earth campaign in the last days of French Algeria, and later Terreblanche beat a farm worker so badly that the man suffered brain damage and is paralyzed.  For this and other crimes, Terreblanche did prison time in the new South Africa.

What has South Africans of all colors worried is that Terreblanche's death will call attention to the spate of murders of white farmers in rural South Africa, and comes only days after the Supreme Court had to ban the song "Shoot the Boer."  Not good publicity on the eve of the World Cup.

Terreblanche's name and his apartheid cause are synonymous with racism in Africa, but of course whites do not have a monopoly on racism.  Just ask Zimbabwean farmers.  One of the keys to South Africa's continued success has been its relatively peaceful transition from white minority rule, thanks to the inspired leadership of Nelson Mandela.  Nevertheless, some 3,000 white farmers have been killed since apartheid's fall.

In East Africa, tourists can buy Mzungu t-shirts, and charity worker Mzungu Mike explains that the Swahili word means "white person, presumed rich."  It's mostly in good fun - most Kenyans and Ugandans see the presumed rich mzungus as potential contributors to their own livelihood.

In Nigeria, white people are sometimes called oyibo (these guys, among the rare white tourists who have braved Nigeria, took it as a term of affection, as in "what are these crazy oyibos doing here?").  And the Nigerian government has been smart to profit from Mugabe's Pyhrric expulsions of white farmers, offering land to many white Zimbabweans, who plan to stay in the country.

Afrikaner author Marq de Villiers, another Huguenot descendant, wrote in his 1987 book "White Tribe Dreaming" that Terreblanche was a "bittereinder of his day."  Like his bitter ender forebears who refused to buckle to British rule after their defeat in the Boer War, Terreblanche could never adapt to a country where one-man-one-vote was the law of the land.

Live by the sword...

Little Church In the Wilderness

God is silent, now if only we can get Man to shut up.

Woody Allen*

- - - - - - - - - -

No doubt the Pope is wishing his household priest had quoted Woody Allen in his homily instead of the anonymous Jewish friend whose mention of antisemitism has caused such a firestorm within a conflagration.  But then humor is kind of hard to insert into an Easter service at a time of deep humiliation and hurt in the Catholic church.

At least we still have Maureen Dowd writing about "unholy week," keeping up the drumbeat despite the Vatican 's attempt to exorcise her.

The "little church" I'm thinking about is not, obviously, the Vatican, which, despite its loss of the Papal States centuries ago, despite the anachronism of a religion endowed with a Secretary of State and a legion of nuncios (priestly diplomats) and other trappings of temporal power, still invokes the Pope's "head of state" status.  Usually this is good for protocol purposes, though it's unlikely that, as the head of a church of a billion or so people, the Pope would ever get anything less than regal treatment when visiting foreign leaders.  Now, though, the head of state moniker will serve to avoid having to be discomfited by lawsuits.

No, the "little church in the wilderness" is figurative, my way of commiserating with the millions of Catholics out there who would feel rather uncomfortable amidst the gilt, the crimson, the ever-so-worldly ostentation of Vatican City.  I've pictured above, for literal purposes, a church we once found while hiking in the Dolomites, but my "little church" is everywhere and anywhere, with normal people whose good priests and nuns tend to their parishes.

Beyond the current furor over the pedophilia, and whether or not you think that the priestly condition of celibacy has ceased to be viable, there is the general direction of the Vatican under this Pope.  Consider what an eminent Egyptian Jesuit has to say:

The great progress made over the last half century is on hold at this time. Facing this almost devastating situation, the church's leadership... minimize[s] the seriousness of the situation and console[s] themselves by focusing on a resurgence of the most traditionalist factions...

Father Henri Boulad wrote the above in July 2007.  If the situation was already "devastating" then, what would he say now?

The progress he's referring to was the great liberal reform of Vatican II, over which Pope Benedict has the same reaction as right wing cultural warriors in the US over the Sixties.  Just like conservatives in the US would like to erase the Kennedy-Johnson era and start history with Ronald Reagan, so too would Pope Benedict XVI overturn the work of Pope John XXIII (Vatican postage stamp, right).  As Father Boulad wrote, in the early Sixties Pope John XXIII "tried to reverse four centuries of stagnation, but there is an impression that the church is gradually closing the doors that it opened at that time."

When Father Boulad refers to "traditionalist factions" encouraged by Pope Benedict, he's referring to such reactionary organizations as Opus Dei, whose heroes include Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco; the St. Pius  X Society and its Holocaust deniers; and the Legionaries of Christ, recently caught up in its own sex scandal and whose list of American apologists, according to Tim Rutten's recent article in the Los Angeles Times

reads like a who's who of the conservative Catholic intellectuals who, in recent years, have insisted that Catholicism and membership in the Democratic Party are all but incompatible.

This is the world of "traditionalist factions" beloved of Pope Benedict.  Beyond concerns over tone-deafness on pedophilia, Catholics in "little churches" around the world must be sick in the stomach over where the Pontiff is leading them.  Back to pre-Vatican II?  That's much too recent.  How about back to the Middle Ages?

* Woody Allen in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations

Iraq: Sovereign, Secular, Saddamless?

The trigger - a loaded word in this context - was the release in Brussels of The Hurt Locker, an excellent film in my book, and worthy of its Oscars.

What did it set off?  Well, my first mention of Iraq in this blog in about 6 months.  We should think about Iraq more often - the US does have close to 100,000 troops still there.

Democrats Abroad Belgium (DAB) organized a screening and discussion at the Cinéma Styx, an institution like no other here.  Tucked away in a residential district, it offers space for about 35 people - just right for a discussion.

I came prepared, having read a couple of interviews with Mark Boal, the journalist whose two-week embedding with an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in 2004 was the basis of an article that he then turned into a screenplay.  It was the embedding that put me on guard, but Boal was very conscious of the "controlled and antiseptic" coverage of the war on American TV.

Here, I think his stint with the EOD guys yielded the right perspective.  As George Packer - the New Yorker writer who also spent time in Iraq - says, “The Hurt Locker isn’t an Iraq movie—it’s a war movie."  Specifically, a war movie about three guys in a bomb disposal unit.  Period.

That said, our DAB audience found a few inklings of political sensibility.  A comment from one of the soldiers about turning possibly innocent civilian suspects into insurgents.   A disoriented moment back in a Stateside supermarket on R&R and other hints of the PTSD that afflicts thousands of troops (and civilians) who never get used to the everywhere-all-the-time war zone.

Some of the Democrats' comments about authenticity echoed those of veterans, especially the depiction - for dramatic purposes - of EOD experts breaking out of their assigned duties to chase suspected insurgents down dangerous Baghdad alleys, without even those famous night vision goggles, let alone infantry backup.

And the film's depiction of the Iraqis?  George Packer again:

There are no Iraqi characters to speak of, but the walk-ons and extras behave, with one or two exceptions, exactly as their real counterparts would—that is, they treat the Americans with wary hostility, ingratiation, or bafflement.

I think that gets it about right, and I think Robert Scheer's calling The Hurt Locker "chauvinistic" is a bit off the mark, despite its US-centric focus.  It's clear that the main character is addicted to war ('war is a drug," the Chris Hedges quote, opens the film).  The final scene gets you thinking - is the US addicted too, to military adventures in the Middle East?

Which brings me back to Iraq, which The Hurt Locker, though set in 2004, rightly reminds us of.  Can it be sovereign with those tens of thousands of US troops there, even after withdrawal from the major cities?  Can it ever again be secular (recent elections provide no conclusive answer), or has the US intervention made a Shia theocracy inevitable?  And even though Saddam Hussein and his family pose no threat, history would indicate that strong men are never ruled out.

So, where does that leave us with The Hurt Locker?  It's a good film, accurate (up to a point) in its portrayal of a highly specialized unit at a given time in 2004.  But the Iraq war didn't end in 2004, and American EOD people continue to ply their trade in Iraq.  It's a good war film, but it's not the definitive Iraq war film, despite the Oscars.  Not yet.

Just like Vietnam and Apocalypse Now and Platoon, we'll have to wait until the war is really over.