Category: Politics (implicit)

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My City of Ruins

Theodore Dalrymple has a very thoughtful essay about Dresden in the new City Journal.

Nowhere in the world (except, perhaps, in Israel or Russia) does history weigh as heavily, as palpably, upon ordinary people as in Germany. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the disaster of Nazism is still unmistakably and inescapably inscribed upon almost every town and cityscape, in whichever direction you look. The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy’s, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. Well-stocked shops do not supply meaning or purpose. Beauty, at least in its man-made form, has left the land for good; and such remnants of past glories as remain serve only as a constant, nagging reminder of what has been lost, destroyed, utterly and irretrievably smashed up.Nor are the comforts of victimhood available to the Germans as they survey the devastation of their homeland. Walking with the widow of a banker through the one small square in Frankfurt that has been restored to its medieval splendor, I remarked how beautiful a city Frankfurt must once have been, and how terrible it was that such beauty should have been lost forever.

“We started it,” she said. “We got what we deserved.”

But who was this ‘we’ of whom she spoke?

Who, indeed? Dalrymple explores that notion of culpability, that almost Greek tragic sense of a cursed house, nation-wide Atreides, shame that pre-emptively annihilates the possibility of pride.

Perhaps I’ll give Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction a read this week.

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Oil for Money

Great piece in the NYTimes today about the scandal of the UN’s Iraqi oil-for-food program. Claudia Rosett at the Wall Street Journal has been way out in front on this story, so it’s good to see it get front-page treatment from the Times.

Because, y’know, it shows that a lot of people had a vested and venal interest in not seeing any sorta change in Iraq. Which is to say, they were making boatloads of money by supporting the regime of a brutal dictator (or a “racketeering crime family,” as Hitchens has put it).

Note: One of the writers of the Times story is getting subpoenaed in the probe of the CIA leak.

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Sudan Update

I haven’t written much about the genocide in Sudan lately, except for a brief rant during my Budapest dispatches. Partly that’s because there’s been so much (belated) coverage by the world media. Also, it’s because Passion of the Present has been doing such a great job of coverage. I sorta figure my interested readers will click the Sudan Crisis link on the top of the Blogroll (left side of the page). If you are interested in learning more about what’s going on there, and what you can do to help save the lives of these people, check out that site first.

The news isn’t particularly heartening. The African Union has committed 2,000 troops to monitor the ceasefire and provide security for refugees, but Sudan is balking at their entry. There was a mass protest of the UN’s authority in the capital, Khartoum. Given the toothlessness of the UN resolution (“Think about stopping or we’ll start having cluster-fuck conversations about sanctions”), I guess this is more a way of protesting the possibility of U.S./UK military intervention.

Stanley Crouch wrote pretty disingenuously about the genocide in the Daily News this week. I don’t mean to say that his desire to see an end to the genocide in Darfur isn’t as strong as mine. But when he called for the U.S. to get involved, he wrote

The Bush administration is also punking out. It is going along with the cowardice and immorality of the world at large because those advising it fail to understand that this is the time to take chances. Had President Bush gone into Sudan with the Army’s new OTW (Operations Other Than War) unit last month, the world would have been caught off guard – and the Democratic convention would have been overshadowed.

There would, of course, be those screaming about infringing on Sudan’s sovereignty. They would make it a matter of pride and unity for Muslims to stand behind that racist regime. That would be to the good, because it might push Muslims into reconsidering the shortcomings of Islamic tradition.

I think his disingenuousness is revealed in the part about “overshadowing the DNC.” He seems to be glossing over the fact that we live in a country so polarized that major media sources snigger about the out-of-date nature of terror warnings and imply that they’re politically motivated, months after complaining that the government didn’t pay attention to years-old info that would’ve “connected the dots” about 9/11. So to imply that the President is simply “punking out” on Sudan is pretty bullshit.

American politics has made this situation far more complicated than it should be. I’m pretty convinced that a mission into Sudan (even one limited to providing humanitarian aid) would be contorted by the left-wing of our media into another example of Bush’s American Empire or somesuch. American deaths in Sudan would somehow be tied into that country’s oil reserves, and at least one Halliburton subsidiary would get involved in construction or logistics of military facilities, bringing the rage of Michael Moore down on the Administration.

(I’m only hoping, in the event that Bush loses the election in November, that he doesn’t follow his dad’s example and commit troops to Sudan after being voted out of office. Sure, Clinton allowed ‘scope creep’ to set in with the Somalia mission, but it was pretty bullshit of Bush Sr. to send armed forces to a third world African country on a vaguely defined humanitarian mission less than a month before Clinton was to be sworn in.)

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been calling for a military force to invade Sudan since I first learned the details of what’s going on. Sudan’s a failed state, it harbored the biggest name in international terrorism, and it’s supporting a program to kill off a million of its own inhabitants. Sure, we need to force immediate aid and security into the Darfur region, as well as the refugee camps in Chad (and our new non-enemy Libya might be able to help provide a base to do that), but I don’t know where that leaves us in the long term.

I suppose Stanley’s right in that we need to build a situation where the Muslim world can stop supporting this regime as a sign of protest against “American hegemony,” which my leftist friends tell me is the biggest threat to world security.

(As opposed to, say, the government of a totalitarian state of more than a billion people trying to suppress information about a wildly virulent, fatal respiratory disorder. I am, of course, just venting over here. Don’t mind me.)

I’m gonna get me some coffee, and maybe I can clean up this rant a little so it actually makes some sense.

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Phase 0

Neat article in today’s NYTimes about changes in preclinical drug testing. That subject matter may not interest you too much, but it’s part of my day job, and I have a vested interest in seeing the pharma/biopharma industry come up with better methods of drug discovery & development.

The best part of the article is that it doesn’t politicize, mention Medicare reform or Canadian reimportation, or imply that the drug companies are venal corporations out to suck the life from the American populace. It just talks about the new developments, some of their ethical questions, and the necessity of improving the R&D return-on-investment.

This is a pleasant change from the last days of Howell Raines, when the paper actually ran an opinion piece by a man who complained that Iressa added several months to the life of his wife, who suffered from brain tumors. No, really.

(Speaking of my day job, if you follow through that link, you’ll see my magazine’s annual Top Companies report, in which my associate editor and I profiled the top 20 pharma companies and top 10 biopharmas. Y’know: if that sorta thing interests you.)