Buy Nothing Day

Shameless plug here for Adbusters and others organizing events to raise consciousness around excessive consumerism. Check out Adbuster's here to see some of the things going on internationally: i particularly like the 'credit card cut up' idea, though i'm guessing that few people will join it off the cuff. You might also enjoy checking out The Story of Stuff, by Annie Leonard, and of course Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, who somewhat ironically have a CD out now called The Shopocalypse. Buy it over the internet and avoid the public disgrace of purchasing. Here's the trailer for Morgan Spurlock's hilarious film about Reverend Billy's movement, What Would Jesus Buy? Even if you don't buy the message, you gotta give him points for the massage.

Pad Thai: Some kind of housing scheme?

If you haven't been following recent events in Thailand, check out my Guardian clips page for the latest report on the airport stand-off in Bangkok. What is most amazing to me about this report is that not one of the stranded travellers seemed cognizant of the fact that they are witnessing a revolution. Literally. If asked about Pad (People's Alliance for Democracy), my guess is that the americans there would say it's a local housing innovation, as in, "My pad or yours?" Or maybe they'd describe one of Thai cuisine's spicier offerings. Either way, it's just hard for me to comprehend how anyone stuck there can talk about it without mentioning the history unfolding all around them.

The Pad folks have been stifling the Thai government for months, there have been some nasty demonstrations in which anti-govt activists were killed by police grenades, etc. and after the parliament decided they could only conduct business by relocating to the airport, Pad dogged them by occupying this facility as well. Persistence is 9/10's of success, as they say. The Prime Minister is due to fly in today from Peru, it remains to be seen (1) if he'll land, and (2) whether the military is going to protect him from demonstrators when he disembarks - if he does land there. Asia Times has been covering this situation as well, and today reports that although the military has been standing down, it's unclear what action it will take at the airport given there are approximately foreign 3000 ticket holders waiting there to board their flights. For the time being, police are staying cool, not wanting to kill anymore Thai's nor bring the street battles into the airport, proper. A fascinating situation both from the perspective of resistance tactics and political movements. As Asia Times' Shawn Crispin says, they have reached a point of no return. Let's hope that where they go next will bring some relief all around, including for those poor tourists who'll never understand what hit them.

They Shoot Journalists, Don't They?

It seems some of the major media networks have engaged in yet another left wing, anti-Israel conspiracy by sending the Prime Minister of Israel a letter of outrage about the inability of journalists to enter the Gaza Strip for at least the past 2 weeks. The letter was penned by higher ups in AFP, BBC, NY Times, CNN, CBC, Reuters and AP - we have to give them props for making the effort, since experience has shown that criticizing Israel only intensifies Israeli intransigence. According to this story, "Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for Israel`s Defense Ministry, said journalists would be allowed in only once Gaza militants stopped shooting and said Gaza was being adequately covered by reporters already there." [italics mine] Although there have been cases of journalists caught in factional Palestinian battles in Gaza, particularly when things seriously feel apart a year and a half ago, it's more than disingenuous to put the blame for journalists' lack of security on the Palestinians. The record since 2001 definitely confirms that, as the Committee to Protect Journalists lists "military officials" as the source of fire in every case. IDF doublespeaker Dror went on to say: `Where Gaza is concerned, our image will always be bad... When journalists go in it works against us, and when they don`t go in it works against us.` Oh, poor babies, just can't win for trying, can you?

Here are some snippets from the CPJ's 2007 report on Israel and the Occupied Territories:

One of the more troubling incidents came in early July during an incursion in the eastern part of the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. Israeli tank soldiers shot Imad Ghanem, a cameraman for the Hamas-affiliated Al-Aqsa TV, and then shot him twice more in the legs after he had fallen to the ground, journalists at the scene told CPJ. Sameer al-Bouji, a cameraman for the Pal-Media news agency, filmed the incident, which was broadcast on Al-Jazeera. The footage showed Ghanem dressed in black clothes similar to those worn by Hamas gunmen. An eyewitness, who requested anonymity, told CPJ that some armed residents of the camp were in the vicinity when Ghanem was shot, but the clip indicates that they were not firing at that moment. Both of Ghanem’s legs were amputated.

An Israeli army spokesman who reviewed the footage said the incident was being investigated, but it was unclear who shot the cameraman, The New York Times reported. An Israeli military source quoted by international news organizations, including the Times and Reuters, said that Israel does not recognize cameramen working for the Hamas-affiliated channel as journalists.

On several occasions, journalists said, Israeli forces and border police intimidated, harassed, and obstructed them by firing tear gas and stun grenades. In mid-February, Israeli soldiers fired tear gas at several cameramen and photojournalists covering clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian stone-throwers near the West Bank city of Hebron, according to the AP’s Nasser Shiyoukhi and other journalists at the scene. Shiyoukhi told CPJ he was overcome by the gas and that colleagues brought him to a hospital in Hebron.

One has to take particular note of the Israeli position that Palestinians working for Palestinian media outlets are not real journalists. This is an offshoot of their belief that Palestinians are not real people, but only a kind of sub-human figment of the anti-zionists' collective conscious imagination. Gaza is the largest ghetto in the world today, nothing Israel is doing there is legal under international law and they simply don't want people to see the extent of the suffering, especially when the UN is coming down hard on them (again, with seemingly little success). Woe is us, who just can't kill these vermin fast enough! i've been getting a stream of emails about fishermen being gassed and arrested at sea, once again for the mere fact that they are Palestinian: the ultimate crime in the Jabotinsky Handbook for Unrestrained Retribution. Can't have "real journalists" reporting on that, it's certainly not the kind of thing one wants to have pop up on the president-elect's blackberry now, is it?

Sorting out the mess in Congo

After confessing to my lack of understanding re the recent explosion of violence in eastern Congo (DRC), i've been reading through article threads on the Mail & Guardian and elsewhere, getting the situation sorted out historically and otherwise in my under-fired cerebral cortex. i recall a retired government bureaucrat in Dar es-Salaam telling me "there is no tragedy like an African tragedy," and what's happening in Congo now unfortunately seems to confirm this. From what i've been able to digest, here are the main issues being grappled with, all very intertwined so the order i'm presenting them in is irrelevant.

* Kabile's government (DRC) has been harboring Hutus (the FDLR) who fled after the massacres in Rwanda and continued to attack Tutsis in eastern Congo. Protecting his people from them has been one of the rationales given by Nkunda for pursuing this sweep of the region. A lot of Africans seem to view this conflict as the ultimate call for addressing the rampant racism that continues to plague the continent.

* Foreign countries are intent of stripping the resources from this area, signing agreements in Kinshasa without giving the inhabitants a voice and supporting violence against them for refusing to have their territory sold to the highest bidder. China is a main player on this stage. This is Nkunda's other rationale, and he says he's willing to march all the way to Kinshasa if that's what it takes to stop the resource rape.

* The UN needs to broker a cease fire in order to get the refugees out, and thought they had done so but no dice. Peacekeeping troops come from a variety of countries and are not operating under a unified command, so they can't stop the fighting any more than they can protect the civilians caught in it. Nkunda now says he won't deal with the UN until they set up a joint meeting with Kabile.

* President Kagame of Rwanda claims the UN's mission in DRC has been supporting Kabile's support of the FDLR, and there is some speculation that Rwanda is aiding Nkunda in an act of tribal solidarity. The consensus among African commentators is that racism is a major element driving the conflict and needs to be tackled on the broadest level possible within the entire continent.

* The African Union, which has essentially blown off the conflicts in Somalia, Darfur and Zimbabwe, is not seen as having any chance of being effective in this even more complex conflict. This is particularly true with respect to its younger partner/offshoot, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) which is discredited with having done nothing to force Mugabe out of power. Since some SADC members, e.g. Angola, have an apparent interest in seeing Kabile stay in power, the credibility of this organization - which the world community would love to see solve this whole business so they don't have to - is next to nil in the eyes of just about every african writing about it.

* The EU is prepared to send forces into the region, yet without a coordinated mission, what they can accomplish in terms of securing a long-term peace is unclear. There are some who see the entire mess, going back to the uprising in Rwanda, as the responsibility of francophone europe; ergo, opinions as to whether the fox can be trusted and effective in really cleaning out the henhouse are extremely varied and contentious.

There's no question that nearly all of the problems found in sub-saharan africa converge in the DRC: lots of horses, lots of carts, i'm not sure that the world can rise to the occasion when it comes to ironing them all out... at least in the near-term, it's clear that's impossible. The question of respecting national sovereignty seems to be used here as an excuse for non-aggressive intervention, just as it always is when it comes to Africans raping and killing each other with all those non-interventionists' arms. Staying out of your neighbor's business is a value highly espoused in the US and, in my experience, most of the rest of the world as well, perhaps excluding arabs. With all the fanfare internationally about Savior Obama coming to set the world right (liberal rapture is truly without comparison in its naivety), there is a chance that this sovereignty-intervention question will start to be addressed. Start - and that's a start. In the meantime, more tragedy in equatorial Africa - prophesy or proverb? Take your pick.

The Things We Go Without

This week i started a collection of short stories by Ivan Klíma, snagged from my generous friend M who always sends me back from Prague with literature to savor. As is typical for so many East European writers, the childhood tales involve trying to make sense of one or another wartime scenario; in this case, a Sudentenland ghetto being thinned out by death camp deportations. The child’s world is a mixture of midnight fantasies and real life food issues: special treats for a family occasion, an extra cupful of soup from a would-be sweetheart in the overcrowded camp barracks, being sure to save enough for his brother to eat. We’ve all seen photos of the skeleton-like survivors from those camps, we know that an extra bite, a hidden piece of bread, was hardly a trivial matter. In a war, which presumably ends at some point, it’s maybe easier to take in extreme levels of deprivation as normal under the circumstances, and to accept rations and other irregularities as exactly that: irregular, for the time being but sure to get sorted out when the fighting ends.

i was thinking about this when i came out of the metro and dropped a coin into the cup of the Astoria station beggar, a very sad older man whose aura of loneliness overwhelms me every time i see him. Maybe you’re thinking that if i’m so concerned about this man, i should take him home for a shower and meal? Fair enough, but here’s the thing: on that particular night, i was going back to a flat with no heat and no electricity, a nearly empty fridge and a sparsity of candles (on top of my running an anglo-saxon establishment here). Obviously the power’s back on now, but i’m still wearing many layers of clothes and rationing the honey. This is not wartime Europe, i work a fair amount but constantly struggle with not being paid on any kind of dependable schedule. It’s become so normal to be plagued by make-it-thru-the-day logistics that what i now notice as “being without” are things which most anyone who’d read this probably takes for granted. i’d be lying if i didn’t admit to feeling a little bit of envy, but mostly i’m just glad to know this isn’t the norm outside my brick walls – as i acquire the tools needed to be a professional something, i can expect my quality of life to improve. Or so the official story insists; at least i’m supposed to have the power to change it. i was recounting my power outage tale to a friend and it turned out that a pipe had burst outside his flat and he’d spent that same night without water. We laughed about the coincidence and whether we’d just be better off living in the woods.

Normally i don’t write much in this space about myself, i’m not very interesting although like most children of the 60's, i guess i’ve had my moments. Last week, the brother of a lifelong friend jumped off a bridge into the Hudson River – i knew him, of course, but have gone for years without hearing anything about him – this news has put me into a quiet, deeply contemplative space… thinking about K, his family, my own periodic obsession with suicide, the limits to our coping mechanisms for dealing with whatever our lives lack - individually or collectively – what we find ourselves having to live without. Really, the human spirit or whatever you choose to call it is an amazing phenomenon when it comes to negotiating voids, distancing ourselves from desires. i can’t remember the last time someone in Budapest asked me how i was and really wanted to know, or maybe they did but couldn’t negotiate my english, and still i go through my life here with a fairly amicable, well-adjusted demeanor. What’s the point of having expectations? It’s a utilitarian world. In a bit of comic coincidence, yesterday i received a facebook ‘message’ from someone in Palestine i really adore but who never communicates except through those silly fb invites, in this case, inviting me to take a test to determine the top 10 things i don’t have enough of. Indeed ironic. What i don’t have enough of is meaningful communication with her! For people like myself, close friends literally all over the map, we just get used to never seeing each other, mostly not seeing this as a measurable problem. There’s not much of a viable alternative for the non-independently wealthy, so we all just cope with this situation and trust that when we do meet again, we’ll be neither disappointed nor disappointing. i’m reminded of something my lover No Nukes once wrote: if we don’t cultivate fantasies while we’re apart, what’s the point in making a trip to be together? No Nukes died nearly 10 years ago to the day and i still miss him… with all the prescribed emotional limits.

My friend’s brother, K, was a very bright, sensitive person and i know for those who were part of his life, the loss is incalculable. i skim over the increasing number of news articles on how financial catastrophe and housing foreclosures are driving more and more people over the edge, knowing that some of those individuals are probably alone in the world but guessing most are not. Our world has driven us to be increasingly short on compassion, even towards those we love. Hungary has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, which makes kind of twisted sense (is there any other way to describe it?) given post-communist era materialism and the rampant individualism it fosters. Whether determined by one’s neighbors’ or one’s own, internal, rating system, everyone’s got limits to what s/he can go without and not lose face or hope. i know many people here who've suffered a suicide in the family, which counter-intuitively seems to have only increased their fears around being real with each other. This is a sad truth, hard to spin into a positive message beyond having respect for a person’s right to escape whatever feelings of misery and hopelessness haunt them. We try to be there for each other, but there are voids which sometimes refuse to be filled, leaving us standing open-mouthed, gaping at the extent to which we can’t understand what’s happened or why. At the same time, one looks inside, trying to tease out the borders of our own coping mechanisms and maybe press down a little on the cracks, just to make sure they’re holding. If you can’t relate to this, be thankful. Thankful but not arrogant, ok? Nobody is fully immune to heartache and depression, even the comfortably numb.

An unexpected outcome of K's tragic death is that it's led to my reconnecting with some people i've been out of touch with for decades. When i say (as i 'm prone to do) that i've lived several different lives over the past 50 years, i mean it seriously. Yet following the threads which string these disparate existences together, falling back on memories which allow me to do that, has always felt like my last resort for not totally losing it when times are tough. i call this the continuum theory for survival, and to anyone reading this who happens to be part of my own personal continuum, know that i'd much rather be typing in gloves and eating cabbage sandwiches than going without my memories of you, past, present and still to come.

Mama Africa passes into eternity

"What I have seen here, I will tell the world in words and in songs." Mariam Makeba

Primate Hell

It had been my plan to totally switch gears and report on some newly identified co-inhabitants of our shrinking blue planet, including a legless lizard, a Borneo fox and a new species of mouse lemur, Microcebus macarthurii, named for the foundation which funded the research into these svelte Madagascar petits (photo by Dr. Blanchard Randrianambinina). In eastern Ecuador, 7 new species of Glassfrogs have been found. but like nearly all these new discoveries - mostly occurring in the tropics, i.e. RAINFORESTS - habitat loss is growing by the day and unless humans ship out to colonize Mars sooner rather than later, biologists aren't all that optimistic about how much longer into the future many of these creatures will survive. Every new species comes with increasingly frantic calls for habitat conservation.

Another spectacular novelty is a newly identified species of manta ray, found in Mozambiquan waters. Here's a super cool photo taken by Andrea Mitchell, an aussie doing her PhD research down there. These animals are certainly otherworldly enough to satisfy my sci-fi challenged imagination. The main threats to their survival are reportedly sharks, the asian medicinal industry and getting caught in seine nets, though not necessarily in that order. Elasmobranchii species feeding on each other may represent a sort of fundamentalist inter-special approach to survival of the fittest, but nothing Mother Nature's delivered on her own has come close to the destruction power of Homo sapiens sapiens. i have nothing against natural remedies and i've always loved my acupuncturists, but with so many of us and so very few of them, can't we find some chamomile blend that will offer up the same health benefits?

As i said, i'd planned to do a "New Non-Voter Roster" or something clever like that with these nocto-marino-primatological species types, but after reading about the crisis in Congo, i just couldn't bring myself to being completely light and airheady. According to lastest reports, dozens of park rangers from Virungi are still missing after the lot of them had to flee from the crossfire between Congolese (DRC) troops and (presumably) Nkunde's crazed hooligan soldados. This is the largest silverback gorilla reserve in Africa, in terms of sq kilometers, and they are now are greater risk than before. The rebels have reportedly taken over the park now.

This is from a year before, thought to be the act of Goma charcoal gangs:

If quasi-local poachers were doing this when there were park rangers around working to protect the gorillas, what should we expect to happen now that these protectors have fled? Can someone tell me what this war is the Congo is really about? What the purpose is? Just a bunch of wild men using territorial conquest as a reason to rape and pillage; the Tutsi position of protecting themselves from Hutu extremists doesn't cut water, given the extremism of Nkunde's forces. Yet even if there was a political justification, do they really need to be disturbing a primate reserve??? There doesn't seem much point in trying to take over territory whose value is destroyed in the process. But i'm sure they don't look at it that way. i'm a member of the vanishing eco-anarcho-liberal species, crying over dead gorillas - for god's sake! Primate hell, no matter which lens we apply.