Avuncular American

Around the World In International English

Before the blogosphere, there was the ionosphere.  Actually, it's still there (image: NOAA), greenhouse effect or not.   And thanks to the ionosphere, you could listen in to the world of shortwave radio.

Thanks to the Taiwanese, who seem to be the only ones making SW radios, you still can - if you want to fool around with frequencies.  There is a certain adventure in zapping around and landing up in Cairo, Moscow, or Rio de Janeiro, even if you can't understand a word they're saying.  I know you can do the same thing with live streaming on the internet, but you might miss the crackle of the radio waves.

But from the comfort of your computer, you can discover a whole world out there - in English.  You and I already know that, but how many of us stick to our favorite sites, bookmarking our way through the usual suspects?  So let me propose a tour of the world, a random journey across time zones that I'll make up as we go along.

First stop, Burma, and the Irrawaddy News Magazine.  The Irrawaddy, based in Thailand and named after Burma's main river, is written by exiled Burmese journalists.  How often do you get an objective (well, anti-regime) glimpse inside one of the world's most secretive societies?

Staying on in Asia, wander over to Pakistan - rather important to know how things are developing there, n'est-ce pas?  No better place than The Dawn, where yesterday's editorial on "Secularism vs. Islamism" described a very outspoken debate on Pakistani TV.

You'll note how random this is: our next stop is the landlocked African country of Uganda, where the Daily Monitor has an interesting story about Fort Patiko, which dates back to the time of Arab slave traders.  Ugandans speak several languages among their ethnic groups and tribes, but the national language is English.

English is widely spoken in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country, so it is not surprising that Al-Ahram has an English-language weekly, where you can read a report about "Fatah-gate," a developing scandal over corruption in Palestinian Authority circles in Ramallah.

Europe has scads of English-language media resources, so I'll cite a very unrepresentative sample of one: "A Fistful of Euros," a memorably-named blog by 15 writers.  Good stuff, and despite its name, not entirely devoted to economics.

Skipping over to Latin America, the Buenos Aires Herald is a 124 year old English-language daily, as befits a country of immigrants, a good number of whom hailed from England, Scotland, and Wales.

If all of my channel-hopping has been too demanding, you might just try WorldFocus TV's "Blogwatch," which has a changing blog roll of worldwide scribblers (including me).

American expats wanting to stay in touch with the "homeland" have a multitude of resources, and podcasts from Democracy Now and NPR are much appreciated.  But tonight, if I'm feeling a bit insomniac, I just might reach for that shortwave dial...

Expatriation: Does Distance Improve Vision?

We're still in the zone where it's acceptable to make lists of things 2009 or "best/worst of the decade," but I'll spare you yet another retrospective.  I do, however, want to comment on a couple of comments received from other bloggers, where, from very different quarters, I was included in "favorite" or "top 5" categories.

It's always flattering to get praise, and I thank my fan club.  But here's the quandary: I have been praised for my "objectivity" and "non partisanship," which are perhaps the last words that I'd have used to describe my attitude to blogging.  When I left my career as a diplomat, I reveled in being able to sock it to the Bush Administration, about which I have real trouble being objective.  And my involvement in Democrats Abroad on behalf of the Obama campaign was highly partisan.

But I'll let my fans speak for themselves.  First, Mark Golbach, who with Linda Brazill publishes "Each Little World," a very personal blog of good writing and photography on a very eclectic range of topics, based in Wisconsin:

Reading Loftus transports me outside the borders of my country, gives me back that outsider's view of things, and provides a measure of objectivity that is very hard to come by in our national press.

Now, from a world that is topically and geographically (though not philosophically) closer to mine, Yasin Akgun of The Conservative Blog,"Independent Conservative Commentary" from Great Britain:

What I particularly like about this blog is that it is written by someone who can be unashamedly non-partisan about the EU, something none of us Europeans can claim to be. It is interesting to see the views of somebody from America on the European Union, something we rarely hear about.

Akgun is referring to my other blog, "Errant European," where I tend to cross-post items that are primarily of interest to European readers of Blogactiv/Euractiv, a Brussels-based media portal on EU affairs.

I think what my pair of admirers may have touched on is my expatriated condition, which lends my subjectivity an aura of objectivity and/or non-partisan observation.  In Europe, I'm an American who lives here and follows events with interest, but not with the same level of partisan commitment that divides Europeans into socialist, liberal (meaning free-market), Green, or conservative camps.  As Akgun's Conservative Blog has pointed out, Europeans are often confused over American politics (so are many Americans!), and have only a vague idea of where Republicans and Democrats would fit on their wider political spectrum.

As an American expatriate looking back at my native country, I also have this interested but slightly detached view, though my partisan commitment is real.  From my earliest years, I was aware that my parents, who came to the US from Ireland, were different from my little friends' parents.  When my father first came to the States, he was amazed at his cousins' and colleagues' chauvinism over things American.  Their unwillingness to believe that things could, perhaps, sometimes be done in a better way overseas, or their conviction that if it didn't exist in the US, it simply didn't exist elsewhere.

Neil Gaiman, a British expat in Minnesota and author of Neverwhere (though the book is on London, its title is a good description of the expatriate condition), says that after years of living in the US, he "still feels alien, which is probably a very good thing for a writer to feel."

Like Gaiman, I think that the view from afar helps visual acuity.  Whether it's farsightedness (image from Wikipedia, "hyperopia"), objectivity, non-partisanship, or subjectivity of a special order, I have made it the thread that runs through this blog.  Glad that some have come to like it.

Avuncular American's First Anniversary

With all the excitement over the elections in the States, I almost let the anniversary of my first year of blogging slip by.  Looking back at my first posts in November 2007, I see that I wrote a good deal more about Iraq than I have done recently (that is likely to change once Barack Obama is inaugurated).  There were several posts on the complicated Belgian political situation, which though it has calmed somewhat, remains complicated and never-ending.  It's the national sport.

One topic - torture, as in US practice of - is one that I would much prefer never having had to write about.  If today's article by Mark Benjamin in Salon is right - "Obama's Plans For Probing Bush Torture" - we may all be learning more about the truth behind Bush's assertion that "This government does not torture people."  In the past year of blogging, I've noticed that whenever I do a post about torture, much of my readership seems to fade away.  Denial?

During this strange post-election, lame duck, transition, phony war period, there will be plenty to write about.  Like many others who supported the candidacy of Barack Obama, I will be scrutinizing the news coming out of Transition HQ, to make sure that realpolitik does not trump the wishes of real people who elected the next president.

But the advent of a new, popularly elected administration, one which has to undo so much that harmed the very foundations of the United States, should account for a slight change of tone in the months ahead.  After all, "avuncular" is in my URL: "In the manner of an uncle, pertaining to an uncle, hence, kind, genial, benevolent or tolerant" according to Wiktionary.

I think Barack Obama should bring out the avuncular in me.

Posthumous Blogging: The Orwell Diaries Start Saturday 9 August

This post is in the realm of a public service announcement: the good people of the Orwell Prize, the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly, and the Media Standards Trust will start publishing George Orwell's diary, 70 years day for day, starting tomorrow. Check it out here. This is their concept:

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens. From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

I'm so enjoying Graham Greene's "Collected Essays" from the same period that I think I'm going to be a regular reader of Orwell's "blog."

Update 10 August: the first entry on 9 August did not disappoint, though Orwell's entry was on snakes, not civil wars.  According to a very nice article in The Telegraph, "George Orwell Would Have Blogged," Allan Massie shows that Orwell's eye for detail included an infinite array of subjects:

He delighted in trivia: "C, of my section of the Home Guard, a poulterer by trade but at present dealing in meat of all kinds, yesterday bought 20 zebras which are being sold off by the zoo. Only for dog-meat, presumably, not human consumption. It seems rather a waste" (April 24, 1941)

Glad to see that even during the Blitz the stiff upper lip allowed such niceties for doggies.  Massie reminds us that "the diaries have already been published in the 20-volume Complete Works, edited by Peter Davison, while excerpts from his wartime diary were included in the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, first published by Secker & Warburg in 1968, and then by Penguin two years later."  For those who like to read in bed or along a gurgling stream, this might be a better bet.