Polytropos

The Condi Smile

I’ll leave the punditry to the proper authorities, but I did notice something interesting about Condi Rice’s testimony today before the 9/11 commission. I listened to most of it on NPR as it was happening, but also saw TV excerpts on Lehrer this evening. And she came off way worse on camera than she did audio-only. Mainly it was her smile, which tried to say “I’m just a congenial bureaucrat trying to be helpful, here,” but seemed forced and often insincere — especially since it broadened when she was the most stressed-out. That stress was much more evident on the screen, too. On the radio none of that was evident, and she sounded fine. Oh, plus there was the whole shellac hairdo thing, but it’s hardly fair to single her out on that count. Certainly not in this town.

Slippery Symbols

Symbols — the ones that we wear, or put on our bumpers, or hang in our windows, or sear onto our flesh — are slippery things. My mistaken assumption that the nail necklace originated with the movie The Passion of the Christ got me thinking about such symbols, but before I get to that let’s start with the American flag.

The flag still serves as a unified symbol when it adorns public institutions, but as a personal expression of patriotism, it has long been fractured. In the Vietnam era, displaying the flag was associated not simply with support or enthusiasm for one’s country, but with support for the current government and especially its policy on the war. War protesters and draft dodgers didn’t fly flags — sometimes they burned them, a clear indication that they associated the symbol not with America-in-general but with an establishment they felt estranged from. (Of course some protesters no doubt did wave flags, but not with a subtext of ‘Well, duh, why wouldn’t I be flying a flag?’ but rather ‘Hey! This is my symbol too!’) UPDATE: See Patrick’s comment in the comments on this point. (I’m very curious about the pre-Vietnam history of the flag-as-symbol — anybody know anything about it?) Resentment and anger are bound to erupt whenever different groups look at the same symbol and see different things.

For a brief moment immediately after 9/11, the American flag moved toward achieving a unified meaning. When tears streamed down my cheeks watching a huge flag unfurl down the side of the Pentagon, it wasn’t because I had had a sudden change of heart about the current Administration; it was because what that flag meant at that moment had nothing to do with government, even for a habitual non-flag-waver like me. A couple weeks later, I was annoyed to hear someone complaining about how everyone had started displaying flags. “Don’t you get it?” I wanted to say to him, “It doesn’t mean what it used to.” Sadly, the meaning has drifted again, and now the flag does mean pretty much what it used to, thanks in large part to the polarization of public opinion over the Iraq war. Much as we talk about the flag as an abstract symbol of liberty and patriotism, there seems to be a strong force pulling it toward association with our government and its policies at any given moment in time.

The Christian cross is a far older, clearer symbol than the flag. Look at someone wearing a cross around her neck — now, or at any point in the past several centuries — and you don’t have to worry about semantic drift or speculate as to what exactly what they mean by wearing it. They mean to say that they’re a Christian. As statements go, though, that’s awfully broad. A cross conveys the basics of their religious outlook, but given the vast number of Christians in the world, and the dizzying diversity of their cultures, theologies, and political persuasions, it doesn’t really tell you their tribe.

And that’s what a lot of symbol-wearing comes down to: identifying your tribe. A cross does this to an extent, but a Celtic cross, an Ethiopian cross, a St. George icon, or a WWJD bracelet clarifies even more. When I go to Gencon I have to decide if I’m going to wear my Over the Edge t-shirt, my MECCG t-shirt, or just a regular old t-shirt (which at Gencon is itself a sort of tribal identification). Nose rings, Nascar jackets, and plenty of things between serve a similar purpose. Even the American flag, in the more narrow meaning I described above, identifies one’s tribe.

But I digress. Another thing about the cross is that the horrific event it literally represents is often forgotten precisely because the symbol is so old and well-established. That’s why Ana wore a nail necklace, as she described in the comments of my earlier entry:

I wore mine that Lent, I think it must have been either ‘95 or ‘96. It is a more raw symbol than a cross, just because we have seen the Cross as symbol of Christ’s death for so long, that it stops being something shocking. Sometimes when we walk around as Christians for years we forget what it means.

This act of finding a new symbol in order to recover a sense of shock reminds me of Tolkien’s notion of “recovery,” which I’ve mentioned before, though never in its proper context, which is refering to fantasy stories. It works quite well as a general notion, though: very often in our lives, symbols, perspectives, even modes of behavior get calcified. We think of them as boring, even, when what really need it to reclaim a new view of them. Maybe what I’m really after here is Chesterton’s word “mooreeffoc,” which Tolkien cited in his discussion of recovery:

Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

We could all do with a bit more mooreeffoc in our lives. Re-energizing symbols is only one of its cool powers. Sadly, whatever’s going on with the movie tie-in nail necklaces is the very opposite of mooreeffoc. It’s taking a symbol that may have some fresh potency and making it bland through mass production and crass marketing. Or trying to — whether it succeeds or not is something we won’t know for a while. The happy ending will be if, upon seeing someone on the street with a nail necklace, one doesn’t immediately think “Ah, yes, it’s that thing from that Passion movie,” but rather, “Why the heck does that person have a nail around their neck?!”

Sticks and Stones

Lunch Money, the brutal cardgame of playground combat, and without question the most disturbing game on my bookshelf o’ games, now has an expansion. Scary. Delightful. Mine’s on order.

Charles Taylor: Unhunted, but Poor

I wrote two weeks ago about the possibility, reported in the South African press, that the mercenaries currently imprisoned in Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea were actually planning to capture Charles Taylor, not overthrow the EG government. There hasn’t been a peep along those lines since, and that, coupled with the fact that major media elsewhere never picked up the story, leads me to conclude — tentatively — that there wasn’t anything to it. There’s always room for doubt in situations like this, but I’m not holding my breath.

So how is ol’ C.T. doing these days? Not so well, it turns out:

Taylor arrived with a large entourage. Dozens of family members and close aides accompanied him to Abuja and onwards the same night to Calabar, on Nigeria’s southeast coast, his agreed place of exile.

Days beforehand a series of special flights from the Liberian capital Monrovia had brought in a couple of luxury cars, household goods and hundreds of hangers-on who fled with the disgraced president as rebels besieged the capital Monrovia.

However, barely six months later, life has taken a lonely, perhaps bleak turn for Taylor.

Close aides said most of his entourage had deserted him, heading back to Liberia or dispersing within Nigeria in search of better fortunes.

“More than 70 percent of the people who came to Nigeria with Taylor have since left him and gone back to Liberia,” said Vaani Paasawe, who was Taylor’s official spokesman in Liberia.

Paasawe, who fled with Taylor to Calabar, told IRIN “Out of 23 personal security details Taylor brought with him, 15 have left because he’s not been able to pay them”.

Good riddance. The best part of this is that a poor and abandoned Taylor will have a harder time meddling in Liberian politics from afar.

Scooped

Ed has beat me to the latest Liberia news. Go to his site for all the details.

Monthly Blogroll Update

This month, with an extra helping of metablogging!

Time to subdivide. The blogroll is now broken into ‘friends’ and ‘strangers,’ depending on whether I know those in question mainly as people or as bloggers. This is not to say that the ‘friends’ are not fine bloggers in their own right, or that all ‘strangers’ are unknown to me personally. The Top Five will remain and will draw from both groups.

On to the changes:

• Hearty congratulations to Kevin Drum for scoring a paid blogging gig at The Washington Monthly. His new blog Political Animal, is front and center at the magazine’s site and promptly takes the place of Calpundit in the Top Five.

So, should we expect something different from Kevin now that he’s actually getting paid? In his case, no, since someone should have been paying him for his excellent punditry before now. Kevin’s one of the rare bloggers whose output is both voluminous and substantive; I can’t fathom the time and energy he happily donated to us all while writing Calpundit. For me — and for most bloggers, I suspect — there’s a limit to the time and effort we’ll spend on something that isn’t a paying gig. There’s been plenty of times I’ve stopped working on an entry and just posted the dang thing, though I certainly would have kept toiling had I been on the clock. In general, then, I think we certainly ought to expect more from paid bloggers than unpaid ones. I thought of this first when reading Josh Marshall’s coverage of the Democratic primary in New Hampshire. He collected donations from readers in order to cover the event specifically for the blog, which struck me as a cool idea. But ultimately that coverage was pretty lackluster — had I made a donation, I would have been disappointed. (On balance, though, Josh is every bit as pay-worthy as Kevin is.)

• Congratulations are also in order for John and Belle, who have become regular contributors to Crooked Timber. I’m happy for them, but insofar as this means a reduction of material on J&BHAB, I’m also disappointed. A big part of their charm is having them on their own site, with two distinct voices and the occasional interplay between their entries. Call me persnickety, but reading their stuff mixed in with the rest of the CT crew just won’t be the same.

• Wonkette has been promoted to the Top Five. I find myself laughing out loud almost every time I read it. And while I have no idea if the drawing on the masthead resembles the real Ana Marie Cox, I have a crush on . . . the drawing, I guess. Man, that’s weird.

• There are two newcomers this time around. A Coqui in Winterfell belongs to Ana Canino-Fluit, who’s giving this blogging thing a try by trying to post something new every day for the first month. little more than a placeholder is also going in the friends section, though it’s something of a borderline case. I’ve only met James once, and briefly at that, so most of what I know about him I know from his blog. But he’s engaged to Kari, which is how I met him in the first place. Either way, he’s a great source for British news and perspective, and has been on a roll the past couple weeks, with entries full of meaty goodness showing up every day.

• Rather than try to keep up with Ed’s ever-changing titles for his blog, I’m just listing his name in the ‘roll from now own. But I have to say that his current title is my favorite so far.

Promoting The Passion

(Snippets of this entry have been hanging around for a while, waiting for some thought or insight to come to mind to help hold it all together. But in this case the coherent, rather than the perfect, is the enemy of the done, and I’m posting it anyway.)

Standing in the Family Christian store in Landmark Mall in Alexandria, looking at all the merchandise tie-ins for The Passion of the Christ, I had to do a double take. In particular I was looking at the necklaces they were selling, adorned with a single, small nail. Setting aside for a moment the issue of whether aggressive merchandising is appropriate for a film with such serious intent and disturbing subject matter, those nail necklaces just seemed morbid.

But then I remembered that, as symbols go, it’s hard to get more morbid than the good old-fashioned cross. So while there are plenty of things to find distasteful and inappropriate about the marketing blitz for Passion, it doesn’t really make sense to object to the nail necklaces on grounds of morbidity. (I don’t mean to belittle the power of the cross itself — it is an immensely powerful symbol precisely because of the horror and hope it simultaneously represents.)

But then, why the need for the necklace? Unlike the t-shirts and bookmarks, as something worn as a pendant it’s deliberately reminiscent of a cross necklace — so what does wearing one signify that wearing a cross does not? Something like this, it seems to me: “I am not only a Christian, but one who embraces this movie.” That embrace includes more than just appreciating the film aesthetically. (Many people whom I respect found Passion powerful and moving, and while my own response was rather ambivalent, I don’t have a problem with theirs.) It also includes wanting the film to succeed, not financially (it’s already there), but evangelically.

While I’ve yet to see someone on the street wearing one of those nails, that sort of support for the movie has been in the news, was readily apparent at the store in the mall, and is all over the websites ancillary to the official one. Sites like sharethepassionofthechrist.com and passionmaterials.com are linked to directly from the official site, and even share the same design style. None of that should be surprising to anyone who’s tracked the development of the film or listened to Mel Gibson talking about it, though Gibson was slightly disingenuous in the interview I cited in my review when he expressed amazement at the film’s reception in the evangelical community. He has very deliberately sought out that reception. Poking around at the message boards on studentshavepassion.com, I found messages posted pre-release in which students expressed delight that a recording of Mel had left messages on their answering machines encouraging them to promote the movie. He’s mentioned in the acknowledgements and forewords of all the Passion-related books, always in near-beatific terms. There was a kerfluffle in some segments of the blogosphere when the president of the Catholic League referred to Gibson as “Saint Mel.”

Three things about all this make me uncomfortable. The first, when it comes to the merchandising, is the simple issue of distastefulness that I alluded to before; that doesn’t really need any elaboration. The second is that the pedestal Mel is standing on in the eyes of some is not something that grew out of the grassroots, but a carefully and masterfully crafted bit of image marketing. Third, this is a bad movie for changing people’s minds. Rather, it may be very good at that, but in the wrong ways: aesthetically it’s a mixed bag, and its honest moments run alongside the crassest sort of emotional bludgeoning.

At the store in the mall, I asked the lady behind the counter if she had seen the movie, and what she thought of it.

“I loved it. Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” I said. “My reaction to it was mixed. I have a problem with the way it focused on the physical suffering.”

“Well,” she said, in a conversation-ending tone, “The movie shows how the Bible says it is.”

“There’s a lot in the movie that isn’t in the Bible, and a lot in the Bible that isn’t in the movie,” I said. (Actually, what I said took considerably longer and lacked the rhetorical balance, but that was the gist.)

“Well,” she said again, “This is how Mel decided to make it.”

Very true, for better or worse. I just wish that was the first thing she had thought.

UPDATE: In the comments, reader Jeff Brower points out that nail necklaces have been around for a while. Oops. This does leave open the question, though, of why the Passion promoters chose to merchandise that, as opposed to a cross or some other symbol. Which has got me thinking about nails and crosses and fishes and flags — more on that to come.

UPDATE: Ana also has some good points in the comments. Generally speaking, read the comments. :)

Blogreading

Some of these are a few days old, but all are worth reading:

• Gary Farber of Amygdala has been blogging the transcripts of the 9/11 Commission. Great stuff. I’m hoping Ella has a long nap early next week so I can get a chance to finish reading it all. Start here and work your way up.
• As Slacktivist noted, he took a couple of days before he posted anything about Fallujah, and as a result what he has to say is balanced and enlightening, particularly on the role of the victims as security contractors:

USAT’s Johnson, following the logic of the term civilian, describes the killing of the four contractors as “Wednesday’s murders.” This too is inaccurate. The killing of these four men was wrong, brutal, cowardly and execrable. And the mob’s behavior after the killings was, as Bremer said, “bestial.” But they were soldiers who died in a war; they were not murdered.

The United States’ increasing reliance on such private military forces muddies the water for those who want to maintain the essential moral significance of the distinction between soldier and civilian, between combatant and noncombatant. (Thousands of U.S. Marines were stationed just outside Fallujah while the bodies of these four contractors were dragged through the streets of the city for hours Wednesday. I wonder if these soldiers would have allowed this to continue unchecked if the four men had been uniformed Marines.)

• Everyone’s talking about PMCs now; I said my piece a while ago, and don’t really have anything to add just yet. Via Making Light, Kathryn Cramer has been tracking the Pentagon’s use of PMCs in Iraq for a long time now in considerable detail. (This entry in particular is very good.) Like Gary’s stuff, I hope to get time to read it all, because I have a feeling I’ll have some comments and disagreements. Ella’s going to need a few long naps, I guess . . .
• Glen Engel-Cox has been having trouble with his heart, literally, and writes about it with the scary sort of medical detail that makes me squeamish even as I crave more. Glad to hear the outlook is good, Glen!
• Michael Hall’s media rant is simply glorious. He starts by laying into CNN and keeps going from there. Preach it, mph.

Crossfire and every Sunday morning show where matched teams of ideologues scrum are a toxic result of analysis culture. They turn political issues that will have an effect on millions into a chummy game of one-upsmanship and backslapping bonhomie between members of the analyst class who want to make it very clear that at the end of the day the whole thing is a collegial debating society for the tragically witty.

• Finally, after all the April 1 fun, Jim has some musings on the ethics of the April Fool’s Joke.

The Lament of an FPS Fogey

I consider myself a pretty sharp guy when it comes to computer games, but but these days it’s starting to feel like old age has kicked me back into the amateur league. Unreal Tournament 2004 is only the most recent and most concrete example. For those who don’t know, UT2004 is the latest iteration of a popular multiplayer first-person shooter. It occupies the “lots of cool stuff” end of the spectrum, with scads of weapons, power-ups, special moves, and a highly configurable physics engine. (The other end of the spectrum, gritty-relastic FPS, is currently dominated by Battlefield 1942.) Recent first-person shooters have rewarded tactics and teamwork a lot more than in the past, and that holds true for UT2004 as well. Nevertheless, reflexes are still king. And I swear, the reflexes required to play this game require some sort of mutant affinity or cybernetic attachment. Everybody’s moving around so quickly that by the time I manage to swing around and aim at a target, I’m either dead or he’s somewhere else. Half the time there’s so many explosions and lights and sounds on the screen that I have no idea what’s even going on.

Being something of a completist when it comes to these things, I started the single player campaign first thing instead of diving into multiplayer mayhem online. UT2004 has surprisingly good single-player functionality — you’re still playing the same levels you would on multiplayer, with a bunch of computer opponents and teammates, but layered over it all is a detailed tournament tree and a system for playing side matches, managing your team, and recruiting new members. (Some or all of this may also have been the case for UT2003, but I never played it.) Anyway, seeing that the default starting difficulty (out of a range of eight) was Experienced, I kicked it up a notch to Skilled, figuring that a cool cat like myself would find the default level too easy.

How wrong I was. I wasn’t even able to qualify for the tournament at Skilled, so I kicked it back down and made a little more headway. But now, maybe a third of the way into the tournament ladder, these dang computer players have brought me up short. Not only am I not able to beat the opponent teams, but my computer teammates always do way better than I do in the matches. Obviously the computer ‘bots can be as tough as they want, but they’d only be this tough if the programmers figured it was a good-but-not-insurmountable challenge for the largest number of their core demographic buyers.

So who are these people? I’m good at computer games, dang it! I have decent reflexes, and hand-eye coordination honed by years and years of gameplay. And yet I am clearly not up to what the designers considered an “average” skill level. I’m not only inferring this from the single-player campaign — I’ve ventured online a few times too, and each time have had my hat handed to me in short order. I’m tempted to blame the hordes of eighth-graders out there, who must have some sort of generational advantage, but it’s more likely that the others playing UT are my age than theirs. I would be delighted if I could chalk it up to hardware deficiencies, because then I could upgrade — but I have an above-average rig for gaming. Connection speed isn’t a problem. It must just be skill, or lack thereof. Maybe — and here’s what I’m hoping — the UT subculture is reserved for really hard-core gamers. I do pretty well in BF1942 and in Halo for the Xbox, after all. Yeah, yeah, that’s it: I’m still a good gamer, but those UT guys are a bunch of freaks.

Now I feel better.

On an unrelated note, Unreal Tournament 2004 wouldn’t play on my computer out of the box. It installed fine, but when I ran the program, the splash screen came up briefly, and then it just fizzled. After an unfruitful trip to the support site, I found the answer on a message board. Hordes of people were having the exact problem I was, and the culprit was Securom, the software that Atari put on the CD in order to copy-protect it. As is often the case with such software, it has a nasty habit of making the disc difficult to run on older CD and DVD drives. The only solution was to use a no-CD crack that someone — probably one of those aforementioned eighth-graders — had whipped up and made available online.

Of course, Atari’s support site mentions nothing whatsoever about Securom, and sends frustrated users on a wild goose chase of updating drivers and tweaking settings. There’s no mention of the limitations of Securom in the Play Requirements label on the box, either. All this, thanks to an anti-piracy effort that also prevents legitimate owners from doing what any sensible person would: make a backup copy of their game. Phooey on Atari, I say. I’d boycott them, but it’s not like the other game publishers are any different. To be fair I’d have to boycott them all, and stop playing computer games altogether. And we can’t have that, can we?

March Search String Excerpts

• hellboy pamcakes — I’m proud that 21 people searching for this found their way here, but I have no idea how. I’ve never mentioned pamcakes before. Mmmmm. Pamcakes . . .
• sean astin and elijah wood undertones return of king movie — I don’t understand this search string. What sort of undertones were they . . . oh.
• peter jackson comic store guy — Hey, we were all thinking it, but show some respect!
• the rhythmic flashing in his head was gradually altering into the familiar alarm call he opened one eye unsure of the motive behind this irritating noise which requested his attention. through a hazy window he located the source of his subconscious intrusion there it stood in defiance its small hands pointing akimbo. a flash of recollection eliminated his frontal lobe as he focused on the small symbols scattered on the round face eight o’clock! — I’m having flashbacks to reading the creative writing of college freshmen.
• is there luck in chess — No, that’s called backgammon . . .
• convince husband baby — This has to be the most poignant search string I’ve ever seen. Somewhere out there there’s a woman who wants to have a baby, but her husband is resistant to the idea. She’s not sure who to talk to, and so what does she do? She goes to Google. I can’t decide whether to laugh or to cry.
• do you have a small rey mysterio costume for sale off the internet? — I don’t personally; talk to Michael Thomas. His blog will be up soon.
• poker collectible card game -software -program -computer — Yeah, because a computer version of a poker CCG would suck, but a tabletop version would rock.

Calling It Off

OK, before I get any more comments, emails, or calls from people, let me hasten to say that the entry Unsettling News was an April Fool’s Joke. Not real. In the slightest.

I was deeply touched and ashamed throughout the day, because of the calls and emails of support from friends who were ready to help in any number of ways. One offered to track the caller’s phone number down for me; another offered to help set up a rotating watch on the front door of our building in case the guy came by again. (You know who you are, guys.)

I honestly thought it was more transparent than that, otherwise I never would have brought Ella into it. I figured the notion that a company would pay attention to what was said on a weblog was implausible enough that readers would do a double-take, even if they were snookered for a moment. (And that was the case for a lot of people who responded.) Since more people found it credible than I thought would, though, the entry was creating a lot of unwarranted (but welcome!) concern that I didn’t expect. Hence, I’m calling off the joke now and not waiting until tomorrow. My apologies to everyone I caused undue worry and distress.

Jim also had an April Fool’s Joke today that proved way more credible than he dreamed it’d be. The funny thing is, Jim fooled me for his first few paragraphs, and I was reading his blog literally minutes after I had posted my own fake entry. I suspect there’s an object lesson here about how strong our impulse is to believe what we read — even when our guard is up, or we think it is.

Anyway, the April’s Fool’s Joke is something you can only do on a blog once. I hereby promise that Polytropos will be falsehood-free from now into perpetuity.

Profile of a Contractor

I hope David Randolph wasn’t one of the four contractors killed in Fallujah yesterday, but their stories are no doubt similar to his own. This article from the Greenville Sun provides an excellent profile of Randolph, how he came to work for Blackwater Security, and his experiences escorting convoys in Fallujah. The article was published the day before the horrific attacks.

Unsettling News

UPDATE: This entry is an April Fool’s Joke. More notes on it here.

OK, I think it’s safe to say I’m seriously freaked out.

It started yesterday afternoon with a phone call that, at the time, I only found amusing. Here it is, roughly, from memory:

“Hello?”

“Is this Nat?” The guy had a rough voice and a hard-to-place accent.

“Um, Nate, not Nat.”

“Nate. You have this web site called Polytropos?” (He pronounced it incorrectly.)

“Um, yeah . . .” I was wondering how he got from there to my phone number. Not hard to do, but he would have had to go through a lot of bother when he could have just emailed me.

“I would like you to stop writing about my company.”

“What’s your company?”

“I think you know. You have been mentioning us quite a bit recently, in a not-so-flattering light. We do not need or want that kind of publicity.”

“Who is this really?” I said. Then he hung up.

I didn’t think much of it, and assumed it was just a practical joke, and I’d find out which of my friends did it in a day or two. But earlier this morning, as I was leaving the building with Ella, I saw a big guy hanging around out front. He turned to face me as I came out, enough that I stopped because I thought he was going to say something. When he didn’t I just nodded and kept on going toward teh car. As I was hooking Ella into her car seat I saw that he was coming up behind me.

“You are Nate?” he said. His voice sounded kind of like the guy on the phone but I can’t be sure.

“What do you want?” I said. My heart was pumping. I was thinking to myself, irrationally, “If this guy takes me down who’s going to know that Ella’s alone here in the car?”

“I am just here to say that I was serious when I spoke to you on the phone. Have a good day with your daughter.” Then he turned and walked away.

I just called the police (had a grand old time trying to explain the concept of a “weblog” to them), but it’s obviously one of those “nothing we can do now; call us if he tries to contact you again” things. As which which company he’s talking about, I can only assume it’s Northbridge, but who the heck knows? And why should they care about me? I guess if you do a search for their name you’ll come across the blog on the second page of searches, but everybody knows that blogs have inflated status on Google. Or maybe they don’t know, and so think that it’s a bigger deal than it is. I don’t know. Maybe it’s still just a practical joke, although at this point I’ve ceased to find it funny.

Anyway. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on any future developments, if any.

Eavesdropping

Overheard at the coffee shop:

“I am SO worried that everything in my life is going to work out . . . I don’t think I want it to.”

Spoken by a teenager — not that there was any doubt.

Cheesy Blue

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are addicted to the glory of Cheez-Its, and those who, tragically, are unable to perceive that glory. Among Cheez-It lovers I am somewhat cavalier in that I tolerate and even approve of the recent glut of new flavors. Cheddar Jack, White Cheddar, and Hot ‘n’ Spicy are all very good, though Parmesan & Garlic definitely crosses some sort of line.

Now, all new, we have Cheez-It Twisterz, which abandon the cracker paradigm altogether. They consist of two elongated parts of differing flavors twisted together. But that’s just the gimmick — more importantly, they have a little bit more substance than your average Cheez-It, and a more generous dose of finger-staining flavory goodness, too. The varieties available so far are “Cheddar & More Cheddar” and “Hot Wings and Cheesy Blue.”

What twisted mind came up with HW&CB? In what sort of depraved environment would it occur to anyone to capture the taste of buffalo wings in a snack cracker? Please note, too, that it’s not “Hot Wings and Blue Cheese” — a description that would no doubt violate any number of truth-in-labelling FDA regulations. No, here we have “Cheesy Blue,” a description that makes no concrete claim as to the snack’s cheese content, only its blueness. Terrifying.

I don’t know who came up with it, but give that man a prize. I bought a box — to try them just once, you understand, in the spirit of inquiry — and lordy, are they tasty. It will take a fair bit of self-control to see to it that they last until gaming night tomorrow, which is the occasion I told myself I was buying them for.

Mind you, I’d take actual buffalo wings over HW&CB C-I Ts any day. What makes them so delightful is in part the unlikeliness of it: we might call it the Scariness-to-Taste Factor, or STF. Also in this category are chips & cheese when the label on the cheese dip doesn’t say “cheese” at all but “processed cheese food.” Somehow the guilt and fear that must be overcome in order to ingest them make them taste way better than they should. Pork rinds have an astronomically high Scariness level but nevertheless a low STF because, for me anyway, they’re not tasty. In retrospect, Pop Rocks had a very high STF, especially if you were a kid and believed the stories about them.

READER: No posts on the blog for five days, and you finally come to light again talking about Cheez-Its?!
NATE: (breaks for the exit)

In Search of Nate

Blame Ed. I got the idea from him. Here’s the deal: do a search for your first name on a Google image search, and pick one of the photos you see there to, y’know, blog about.

I honestly wasn’t planning on joining this particular bandwagon, but I naturally had to peek at what was there for my name. And I noticed that ‘nate’ turned up this picture in the number five slot:

See, the thing is, I know that guy. No, not the one on the right — the other one. The Nate. I forget his last name, but I see him every year or so at Rick Treur’s annual Christmas party in Grand Rapids. The picture is from 2000, when one of the GOP primary debates took place at Calvin College, my (and the other Nate’s) alma mater.

The first thing I thought was: why the heck is he being so friendly with George Bush? Then I remembered that West Michigan is pretty conservative, all things considered. No reason Nate wouldn’t be. (And heck, it was 2000 — even conservatives didn’t know better yet.)

I’m going to take this stupid little Google game a step further, and do my small part to hinder Bush’s reelection chances to boot. I’m going to try to get another Nate picture — yes, a picture of me — up above the Bush one in the Google rankings. Given my surprising luck with Google image rankings thus far, this shouldn’t be too hard. So, here’s the pic:

I figure the cute baby factor will pick up a few extra clickthroughs.

A Planeful of . . . Bounty Hunters?

Well, this is interesting.

The latest tidbit in the tale of the captured mercenaries is the claim, made by several of their family members and some news outlets, that they weren’t going to Equatorial Guinea to stage a coup, but to use that country as a staging area in order to capture Charles Taylor.

Wacky as it may seem, it’s actually quite plausible. EG borders Nigeria, and Calabar, where Taylor lives in exile, is only 200 miles away. And, as I’ve discussed before, a bounty for Taylor’s head is not a new concept. But current sources (the above-cited and this one are good; the news hasn’t been picked up by AP or BBC yet) mistakenly state that the U.S. has a $2 million bounty on Taylor’s head. The reality is more complicated, again as has been discussed here — check out the links in the highlights for all the info. The short version is that some enthusiastic Congresspeople put the money into the big $87 billion spending package for this purpose, but the State Department has distanced itself from the notion. And the wording is ambiguous enough that, coupled with State’s position, you can’t really say that there’s an official bounty out there.

Northbridge Services has been excited about cashing in on that “bounty” money. There’s even some indication that they’re the ones who put the group together, though they deny it. (Of course they would, at this point.) Again, it’s plausible: Northbridge is basically the old Executive Outcomes with a bunch of cosmetic changes, and a bunch of the captured mercenaries are known former employees of EO.

I’ll come back to all this when there’s a bit more news out and when I have more time to sift through it all — I’m tossing this off in a jiff before Ella wakes up from her nap. Oh, and go back and read Josh Marshall’s notes on Dodson Aviation, the American company that sold the captured plane to Logo Ltd. He found a connection between Dodson and the Sierre Leone Special Court — yet another tidbit that makes the “bounty hunt, not coup” notion quite plausible. In fact, I’m even leaning toward “likely” now. And kicking myself for not prophetically speculating in this direction a few days ago . . .

UPDATE: Thinking about it a little more, I’m downgrading the likelihood of the Taylor hunt, though it’s still very much on the table. But: if you were in a Zim prison looking at life incarceration, maybe even death, wouldn’t you scramble for any defense you could? And since you’d been caught with all sorts of equipment for a military operation, it has to be plausible. “We were going after Taylor” is the perfect alibi for these guys, since Calabar is nearby, Taylor has been in the news, and there’s even a kind of U.S. imprimatur thanks to the $2 million in the budget. This would also explain why one source for this info is the families speaking out. Why hadn’t they said anything before? And how likely is it that they’d be informed about their husbands’ operation beforehand? But, having those husbands facing a gruesome fate, wouldn’t they readily lie to protect them?

What’s remarkable is how much circumstantial evidence there is for both theories. But they can’t both be true. Anyway — more in a few days.

UPDATE: Something else I forgot to mention: Nick du Toit, the leader of the mercenaries held in EG, confessed on TV that he was there to start a coup. Now, he clearly could have been forced to make such a claim, so that President Obiang could carry out the reprisals and clamping-down that he’s doing even now. But the Zimbabwean government claims that the mercs there made the same confession.

On the one hand, if they really were going after Taylor, I can’t imagine why they would confess to a completely different plan — especially since it’s one that carries possibly deadly consequences for them. On the other hand, we can’t fully trust anything they say while they’re speaking from their respective prisons.

Still a muddle . . .

Breaking the Machinery of Division

I wasn’t all that surprised to hear about Richard Clarke’s allegations against the Bush Administration — it all jibes with stuff we’ve been hearing about them from the beginning. The only thing that surprises me less, really, is how quickly the partisans on both sides have laid out the talking points for why he’s credible or why he’s not. Suddenly, Clarke is either a pompous, craven opportunist or a truehearted civil servant finally speaking out — there’s precious room for anything in between, though you can find more nuanced portrayals out there if you look.

It’s a commonplace notion that Washington is divided; what’s surprising is how trenchant the partisanship has continued to be. Bush’s out of control spending and interventionist foreign policy should be pissing off Congressional conservatives, to say nothing of the fact that the White House knowingly lied to Congress about the real costs of a Medicare Bill that, now that it’s passed, nobody seems happy with. So where’s the revolt? You won’t see it, because as much as Bush’s credibility is crumbling, if Congressional Republicans decide he’s no good the only alternative is Kerry, and a big swing for Kerry will ripple into Congressional races, and the Republicans could lose the Senate, and — on a reeeally long shot — the House. No matter how many leaks there are in Bush’s boat, Republicans can’t afford to abandon ship.

The lock-step phenomenon is institutional, but the current White House is encouraging it. Clarke is only the most recent person to voice this sentiment:

For one, the Bush White House assumes that everyone who works for them is part of a personal loyalty network, rather than part of the government. And that their first loyalty is to Bush rather than to the people. When you cross that line or violate that trust, they get very upset.

What we have here is an object lesson on the weakness of the two party system. Even when there’s not a President enforcing the us-or-them mentality with playground-style bullying, it’s still there. I think voters would be better off without it — years of forcing us into two camps has encouraged a division among the populace as well. The whole Red Nation/Blue Nation meme is a gross oversimplification, but one that’s borne out around election time because there’s only two real camps to choose from. But the two party system isn’t going away any time soon. What it will take, as a first step in a long, long process, is a viable third-party or independent candidate in a major election — one whose integrity, charisma, and policy savvy clearly exceed that of her opponents, even if she (or he) doesn’t ultimately win. Our recent contenders (Nader, Perot, Reform Party) haven’t even come close.

So else might be done to, if not bridge the partisan divide, at least get everyone to play nice? Let’s look to Congress. The vast majority of those Congressional Republicans I mentioned earlier aren’t falling in behind Bush because they’re worried they’re going to lose their seats, but because if they lose the majority then they lose their committee chairmanships. If the Democrats should inch above them by a single seat, they lose all their cool special abilites in the Congressional game. They become — cue foreboding music — the minority party.

The fact that Congressional power is an all-or-nothing proposition, especially in the House, contributes significantly to the partisan divide. It means that every member’s self-interest is tied up with that of their party, even when their policy positions differ or when their leadership is leading them astray. But it’s not the Constitution that makes it so, just rules of order. So change them. As a start, make committee chairs proportional to each party’s representation, instead of giving them all to one side. I’m not a Hill-dweller, I’m just married to an ex-Hill-dweller, so I’ll have to punt here when it comes to other concrete suggestions. But you get the idea.

Of course, for such a change to happen, the majority party would have to want it to happen. And who ever votes themselves out of power? So maybe it’s as much a pipe dream as a multiparty system would be. Ah well. We can dream.

A Planeful of Trouble

The detainment of a cargo plane full of mercenaries in Harare two weeks ago has unfolded into a complicated, very African sort of mess. I missed the boat on the first round of speculation: who are they and what were they planning to do? It’s now fairly certain that their stop in Zimbabwe was a layover to pick up weapons and ammunition, and that their final destination was Equatorial Guinea, where they planned to take part in a coup against President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. The fact that Robert Mugabe said so counts for very little, but South Africa has confirmed the story, and the available evidence makes the alternate explanation — that they were just a bunch of security guards heading to jobs in DR Congo — seem pretty thin. BBC News is a good source for the basics of the story.

This article, from Joburg’s Mail & Guardian via AllAfrica, explains just who these guys are. Basically, they’re your typical batch of African mercenaries, mostly white, with plenty of connections to the old South African apartheid regime. Simon Mann, the leader of the group arrested in Zimbabwe, was long associated with Executive Outcomes, and later became on the founders of Sandline International. He’s also an actor. Nic du Toit, arrested in Equatorial Guinea, is a South African special forces veteran, also with ties to EO. Compared to the sort of mercenaries working in Iraq, these guys seem a little more hard-core. Most of them are veterans of operations in Angola, whose civil war has long been a mercenary-driven bloodfest.

The new big question is: Who hired these guys? Mugabe’s statement is predictable: he says it’s the intelligence services of the U.S., Britain, and Spain. That’s a claim that’s transparently designed play on the preconceptions of the populace. It is impossible to overstate the shadowy, Illuminati-like powers that many Africans believe the CIA possesses. In Liberia and Nigeria, you’d hear those letters pronounced with a certain degree of ominousness, spaced out to make each one sound like a separate word: “C … I … A.” Given the CIA’s actual involvement in all sorts of Cold War shenanigans, especially in Angola, this perspective isn’t at all surprising, although it ascribes way more power, influence, and competence to the organization than it actually has.

Throwing Spain into the accusation may be a little more than just an Iraq War reference, though — Equatorial Guinea is a former Spanish colony. It achieved full independence in 1968, and President Obiang seized power twelve years later in a violent coup in which he executed the former President, his uncle. As brutal dictators go, he isn’t in the same league as Saddam Hussein, who himself has to get in line behind Robert Mugabe. (The Atlantic recently ran an excellent piece detailing Mugabe’s systematic destruction of his homeland.) But if you measured human-rights abuses and corruption on a per capita basis, Mbasogo would definitely be in the running for first place. The discovery of oil in the mid-Nineties has given Equatorial Guinea astonishing economic growth in the past few years; it goes without saying that the wealth has been channeled to Obiang’s friends & relations, who hold virtually all positions of power in the government. Oil means an explosion of unrest, external meddling, and a constant state of political instability — far from being black gold, it’s a black curse, just as it’s been in Nigeria and Angola.

Given all of this, it’s easy to see why Mugabe would want to enthusiastically punish coup plotters with the death penalty, even though he wasn’t their target. As Obiang goes, so might he go someday. But stable African nations, too, have an interest in curtailing mercenary revolutions of this kind. As long as the coup d’etat is a commonplace way to change power in Africa, the continent will never achieve its economic and social potential.

News of what’s going on in Equatorial Guinea right now is sketchy, but none of it is good. Obiang is clearly using this opportunity to foment hysteria in the capital and crack down on his political rivals. Foreigners are leaving the country in droves, mostly by choice but some by force. The conspirators arrested in EG are likely to face a shotgun trial and quick execution (one, a German, has already died in prison); the ones in Zimbabwe aren’t likely to fare much better. And while you could easily say that them’s the breaks in the line of work they’ve chosen, it’s not like EG would have been much worse off if they’d succeeded.

So, who did hire the mercenaries? Though opposition leaders in EG deny involvement, they’re at the top of the suspect list. Severo Moto Nsa, the head of the opposition Progress Party, is currently exiled in Spain. It would surprise me more to hear that the CIA was involved than to hear that oil interests were. A grand, multinational conspiracy is unlikely; all it takes to get a bunch of guys like this on the move is a few million bucks. The most interesting as-yet-unconfirmed wrinkle is that the mercenaries captured in EG itself were actually working for President Obiang’s government as part of a security contract for Logo Logistics, the guys who bought the detained plane. It’s wacky, but the “secret insider” theory rings true, especially since (according to this article) one of that company’s senior executives is Ely Calil, “a wealthy London-based Lebanese businessman with close ties to Equatorial Guinea opposition leader Moto Nsa.”

There’ll be plenty more coming to light in the next few weeks, to be sure — too bad a lot of up will come from the EG and Zimbabwe governments, and so be of questionable reliability. The current big story is where the Plane mercenaries will be tried and whether they’ll get the death penalty. But my thoughts are with the people of Equatorial Guinea, a country I hadn’t given a second thought to before now, but who, despite the fabulous wealth of their leader, will be having to live under an even more autocratic regime from here on out.

A Gammony Kind of Guy

Backgammon attracts a lot of odd people. And remember, I say that as someone who regularly attends Gencon. A case in point: yesterday Steve and I were playing over at the Grounds when a middle-aged, slightly disheveled guy walked right up to our table. His eyes bugged out slightly, and he wore a pair of really big headphones around his neck.

“That’s a big board,” he said.

I avoided eye contact, knowing that Steve, who is far more polite than me, would shoulder the burden of conversation. “Um, yeah,” he replied.

“Where did you get it?”

“It was a Christmas present.”

“I used to have a round board. It was round. A circle. Round. But a guy borrowed it and I never saw it again.” He paused very briefly. “Do you guys play for money?”

“No,” said Steve, “We just play for fun. I get too stressed out when I play for money.”

“Ah, they don’t let you play for money here,” said the guy. “Well, I’d still like to play. We should play some time.”

“Yeah . . .” said Steve.

“I put up a sign on the bulletin board but they took it down.”

“Well, there’s a lot of people around here who play.”

The guy nodded. “That’s good. I’d like to play. I’m the greatest backgammon player in the world.” I still don’t know if he was serious — his demeanor was just off enough that he could have been simply nuts, but you couldn’t be sure.

“Really?” said Steve.

“The only one better than me is Jesus Christ.”

“Does he play backgammon?”

“He’s the one who brought it to earth.”

Then, without further comment, the guy stalked out. A few minutes later he came back and introduced himself by name. He seemed disappointed that we were still playing each other. “I’d still like to play some time,” he said. “It’s OK if it’s not for money, if they don’t allow that here. I mean, I do play for money, but we can just play for fun if you, you know, don’t want to play. For money.” Then he stalked out again.

The thing is, if he hadn’t said the thing about being the best backgammon player in the world, I would’ve been perfectly happy never to see him again. But now I want to play him, if only to put him in his place — or learn a thing or two if he turns out to be some sort of freaky backgammon genius. Either way, I’ve got to know. You can be sure I’ll let you know if he ever turns up again.

Do Something Spontaneous

Denizens of Greater DC, take heed:

Tonight. At Velvet Lounge. The long looked-for return of The Spontanes. A finer band of finer folk you’ll find hard to hear in this great town. Also on stage tonight: The Spoils of NW and The Five Maseratis. See you there.