21 Jan 2023
Let’s see what’s going on out there this week. First, there’s the false equivalence of the dueling classified documents.
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Then there’s the war.
Because many of us are natural optimists, we expect, without really knowing how exactly, that pretty soon this war in Ukraine will end and everything will be put right. We’re almost certainly wrong. Nothing aside from wishful thinking really points to an end in sight, and in fact lots of things point to a grinding, continuing war of attrition: the initial Russian advantage in weaponry is fast being neutralized, Russia’s political system would have a difficult time admitting error, Ukraine is determined to defend its land and people.
I suppose it’s possible we’ll wake up tomorrow and Vladimir Putin will be gone, but what if that’s wrong, too? Suppose he sticks around. At age 70, with the finest health care available in his country, there’s no obvious reason we know of that he shouldn’t be around for another decade or more.
Which makes me wonder what Alexi Navalny thinks of his own life. If, as most people think, he will be held until Putin is no longer president, does Navalny regret jumping on that plane back from Berlin to Russia two years ago, after Putin almost killed him by having him poisoned in Tomsk in summer 2020?
Navalny once called Putin “a thieving little man in a bunker.” As he endures another winter in his own substantially more spartan bunker in maximum security prison IK-6 in Melekhovo, between Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, I wonder if Navalny thinks it has all been worth it.
He must ponder the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, another would be reformer who even led her country briefly, in uneasy cohabitation with the Burmese military. Now, at age 77, Suu Kyi also languishes in solitary confinement in the Burmese capital, Naypyidaw.
Suu Kyi, whose father Aung San was the father of modern Burma, was born in Rangoon but educated abroad, married a British academic and moved to Oxford. She returned to Burma in 1988 to care for her mother, and while there allowed herself to be drafted into an uprising which led to her party winning 1990 elections. The then-military junta didn’t recognize the election results and Suu Kyi spent about 15 of the next 21 years holed up under house arrest behind high gates at 54 University Avenue.
This wasn’t freedom, but it clearly wasn’t the gulag either. Most of the time her lawyer could bring her Time and Newsweek and she could play her old piano until the muggy weather at the mouth of the Irrawaddy River warped the keybard. In the best of times, she could stand up on a chair, hang onto the wrought iron fence at her gate and address a crowd.
Number 54 University Avenue, in a gracious lakeside setting and pretty far along in slumping toward shabby (as was everything else in Rangoon), became a tourist destination in its own right. We visited (but didn’t see a thing) in 1995; actually we just had our hired driver drive slowly past. Of course he knew where it was. Everybody did.
Her greatest moment came in 2015 when she claimed a government post akin to Prime Minister, but she was arrested again in 2001 when the current junta couldn’t abide her victory in another election, and since then she has languished in prison with charges and sentences seemingly added at random. As of the moment she is sentenced to 33 years on ten charges.
Do they think it has been worth it? In the endless quiet time they both must endure, do they now believe they might have done more good agitating for change from outside? There is no one to ask but Navalny and Suu Kyi, and chances are we won’t get a chance to read their memoirs anytime soon. By the math, Navalny, at age 46, has a decidedly greater chance to survive his regime and be free to write those memoirs than Suu Kyi. But you have to wonder, does the prospect of martyrdom do as much for the two of them now as the hope they held out when they were free?
Navalny’s quest goes on through his daughter Dasha:
When my wife and I went to Burma in 1995 the junta called itself the SLORC, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, a name so maladroit you couldn’t make it up. They changed it to SPDC, for State Peace and Development Council, in 1997. It put out a six or eight page broadsheet, then the country’s only newspaper – the New Light of Myanmar. It still exists today. The Burmese government does at least one thing well: when it comes to turgid, New Light is perfection. Here’s an example:
You can get your very own New Light of Myanmar e-paper here.
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Countries change their names for a variety of reasons: to shed an imposed colonial name (Northern Rhodesia to Zambia), for political advantage (Republic of Macedonia to the Republic of North Macedonia), to employ the local language (Swaziland to Eswatini) to declare independence (Irish Free State to Ireland), even just for marketing (Czech Republic to Czechia). But it seems to me the wider world should only recognize the change if it’s made by a legitimate government. Thus
Holland to Netherlands
Cape Verde to Cabo Verde
Ceylon to Sri Lanka
but not
Burma to Myanmar. Burma remains Burma to me.
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I’ve been listening to podcasts this summer, and if I were struck by a fraction as many notions as interviewers say they are, I’d be a beaten up, tattered old scarecrow hung on a pole. But okay, one notion I am struck by is how early it is in the history of the podcast genre, and how much it could already use a good, thorough housecleaning. Podcasting needs a Stylebook.
I have an idea I’ll be returning to this topic, so just a couple of basic impressions here.
• Get to the point. I find I miss nothing by skipping five minutes into just about any podcast. This is the only time you might be sure you have the listeners’ attention so don’t waste it (!) and this is where amateur hosts drone on about how cool their new podcast is and all their plans for the future. Podcasters, put your content up front. A brisk, brief introduction will suffice, then, get to content. If the listener is interested s/he will wait until later for more bio about your interesting guests, or look ‘em up later without you.
• Remind the listener where they are and what you’re doing here. Notice how many podcasts neglect this. “We’re talking with _____ about _____ on this edition of _____” is all you need. Just drop it in every five or ten minutes and keep moving. This needn’t take but a few seconds. This is just basic tending to your product. It’s good, healthy maintenance. Like this Subscribe button.
And one more thing, that applies to all media, not just podcasts: there is no requirement that the reply to “thanks for joining us” must be a smarmy “thanks for having me.”
On the topic of getting things right online, few will be struck by the notion (to borrow a phrase) that the internet is dehumanizing. It would be a more pleasant place if people just thought for a minute about what they were doing. No need to get militant with a button that demands “SUBMIT!” when you’re just asking for my email so you can send the garden club newsletter.
This week I happened across a form that made me think I’d enjoy knowing the human who wrote it. No having to scour a grid of tiny squares for all the photos with traffic lights here. It just gets straight to the point:
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There has been a flutter of silliness lately about whether UK Prime Minister Sunak uses the NHS. Of course he doesn’t.
"I am registered with an NHS GP (general practitioner), I have used independent healthcare in the past," Sunak told parliament during prime minister's questions.
Everybody knows this very wealthy man uses private doctors, and most people think that's fine. An argument can be made that he should use private docs so he can get on with running the country. It’s just plain silly that he feels he can't say so.
But then, British Everyman Rishi Sunak is not. Sunak brings to Tory leadership all the raw power and presence of a well-meaning property assessor.
He and his wife, a tech heiress named Akshata Murty, are said to be worth around £730 million ($844 million). That should afford the couple the opportunity to get prompt care, and maybe that’s the right thing for a busy national leader to do, so that s/he can get back to the business of state.
Margaret Thatcher came right out and said it: “I, along with something like five million other people, insure to enable me to go into hospital on the day I want; at the time I want, and with a doctor I want.”
Arrogant, but honest. The trouble with Thatcher was that she went on to say “Like most people, I pay my dues to the National Health Service; I do not add to the queue...” which is Tory code for replacing the NHS with privatized health care, something wealthy backers of Sunak’s party are keen to cash in on.
One more thing about the United Kingdom: no one, absolutely no one, has asked me how I feel about Prince Harry and his new book. Which doesn’t keep me from answering, both. Yes, the monarchy does appear to be a cold and soulless warren of woe. And yes, the prince sure is a troubled young man. The best headline I’ve seen so far comes from the Guardian’s John Crace:
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Davos has just closed up and now we look forward to this year’s Munich Security Conference March 17-19, at its usual home, the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. It ought to be a great year, if you’re into this sort of thing. It may offer up a little domestic German political drama, although probably not to rival 2007, when Vladimir Putin stood at the Bayerhof lectern to serve up a half hour of blistering contempt. With Germany at its zeitenwende and the Leopard tank question swirling, this year’s shop will be talking topics that apply right there in the Federal Republic.
Alas, the MSC website is slow, always opaque and never helpful.
Recall back last January, Olaf Scholz’s first defense minister Christine Lambrecht declared that, to show it meant business, Germany would donate 5000 helmets to the war effort. It was a defining moment for Lambrecht exactly a month and a day into the job, after which she tried but failed to rescue her gravitas.
Many of us have been working to discern how the view in Berlin is different now from before the zeitenwende arrived, because it’s not altogether apparent. Germany’s army is scandalously under-equipped and has been, but there’s one thing they have that Ukraine would really like, yes, even more than helmets.
This is the Leopard tank, which the government has come under fierce pressure to make available to Ukraine. Leopards are designed to be operated by conscripts, meaning there’s not months of training needed. Thirteen European countries already have Leopards, meaning Ukrainian infantry could be trained up fast in many places.
Poland and Finland, among others, have been coaxing Germany along by offering to donate their own Leopards instead of Germany’s. This would require German approval, which has not been forthcoming.
In a big meeting at the end of the week, Germany decided not to decide. Said they have to count up how many they have, mumbling obfuscations like that. You could see from US Def Sec Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley’s straight-backed military assurances that Germany is a fine ally indeed that what they think is really quite the opposite, at least on this issue, and that they were not grateful to get hauled all the way over to Ramstein to participate in this latest German waffling.
I think this is a really tough moment for German policy. At the end of the week Germany’s demurral on the Leopard question laid bare its fundamental divergence from its allies. Soul searching, high-minded navel gazing and thousands of column inches are coming, as we learn from columnists what it all means.
But it must be said that however keen the neighbors may be to donate another country’s tanks, apparently the Kanzler isn’t far from the mood of the German people. In a December poll less than half (42%) of Germans favored long-term political and military support for Ukraine. (Compare that to 82% next door in Poland.)
The Czech presidential runoff is next weekend. Petr Pavel, a retired general and former head of NATO’s Military Committee (which is made up of member states' Defense Chiefs), faces former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, an oligarch/populist scandal machine.
Pavel landed just ahead in the first round of voting last weekend with just 22,000 votes more than Babiš, of 5.5 million votes cast, and the runoff looks just as tight. The Czech president wields more practical power than in some parliamentary systems, appointing the Prime Minister and the cabinet.
Something interesting here (besides how evenly divided Czechia is) is how political definitions continue to change, no matter where you look. General Pavel told a debate moderator that “I myself would sit somewhere to the right of center with a strong social accent.”
Right of center he says, yet he supports traditionally left-leaning tenets like stronger redistribution of wealth, citing as a model “Denmark and all of Scandinavia in general. In some instances he could support higher taxation. He supports gay marriage, adoption for homosexual couples, looks favorably on euthanasia and opposes the death penalty.
In the campaign, at least, he presents as a pragmatist, a hands-on, ‘whatever works’ kind of guy. He’s for ‘the combination of all approaches,’ he says, evoking Vaclav Havel and giving nostalgic older Czechs palpitations. Babiš, on the other hand, is a firebrand, and a third of the country supports him.
A Slovak-born billionaire, (food, media, chemicals), Babiš created his own political party, ANO, as a vehicle for his political aspirations. Ano is short for Action of Dissatisfied Citizens. It’s also the Czech word for yes. For his debut as a politician in 2013 Babiš had a clever leg up; he could effectively promising anything and always give the same answer. Will you cut taxes no taxes? “Yes.” Will you give us 365 days off a year? “Yes.”
Look how close this race is. The 22,843 votes separating Pavel and Babiš represent 0.004% of the electorate.
(On Prague, I don’t know when the next time we’ll talk about Czechia might be, so one anecdote I’ve been dying to share, I can’t say it’s one hundred percent true, but it’s a fun tale told to me six or seven years ago by the then editor of the Prague Post:
Czechs are great EU skeptics, pocketing the net gain that Brussels sends down while complaining about invasive rules, and the more inane the rule the better, like Boris Johnson’s famous ‘You cannot sell bananas with abnormal curvature’ claim. Critics of Brussels made hay when an EU rule on the speed of escalators had the effect of changing the public transport schedule in Prague, as a particularly long escalator had to slow down to comply.)
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Now let’s just get a few things straight. This is obviously true because Representative George Santos is guilty of pretty much everything. Not a lot of people know this but he and Klaus Schwab started the World Economic Forum at Davos. Even fewer people realize he is secretly providing nuclear technology to Kim Jung-Un. And he was at Pope Benedict XVI’s bedside when he died, you know.
Meanwhile Linda Ronstadt’s father invented the plastic ice cube tray. That’s true, actually.
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Here’s a shining example of the political right in action on one of its core pledges: “In her first week as governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared the use of the word “Latinx” must be eliminated from official government document use.”
“All right Sarah, let’s think up all the different things we could do this first week!” her tipsy-with-power brain trust enthused that first night. And then they did, and BAM, there it is. Libs, you are so owned in Arkansas.
(One cause for hope out of Arkansas, though, we just maybe might get a few weeks off from the doggone it, downright folksy wisdom of Governor Asa Hutchinson on the Sunday talk shows, for gosh sakes, y’all, because he’s now, at last, the former Governor. But alas, sadly, he is also a future presidential candidate).
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A book: I’ll try to find a context in which to write more about this, but I’ve just finished a book that has really stayed with me. It’s Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka by Chris Lockhart and Daniel Mulilo Chama. These guys are aid workers in Zambia who have documented life on Lusaka’s streets using a murder as their vehicle. It’s a remarkable book. I kept finding myself having to stop and say wait, this is not fiction. This is life for these people.
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Hitchens
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And finally, follow @JohnnyCallicutt on Twitter for your daily Nancy comics by Ernie Bushmiller.
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So there you go, my first quick snapshot of the world out there. Thanks for joining me. Please subscribe. You can subscribe for free, but if you contribute, I’ll mail you a signed copy of my book Out in the Cold.
Most Saturdays I’ll do this column. Most Tuesdays I’ll post a story about travel to a less than mainstream location (Read last week’s trip to Greenland). Next Tuesday we’ll travel to Rapa Nui.
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Thanks for your time. Thanks for joining me. See you next Tuesday.