Ishmael Beah. What's Not to Like?

I won't subject y'all (y'few) ou to another book review so soon after the last ones, but merely point you toward a couple of books which you may already be aware of.

The first, A Long Way Gone, was published in 2007, which is more or less when I read it. It is a powerful and moving story about the author's life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone beginning when he was 13 years old, and his good fortune to escape after a couple of years, thanks to Unicef, and end up in the U.S.

The second book, Radiance of Tomorrow, was just published a few days ago. It is a novel that deals with Sierra Leone after the war and with the question of what makes people return and reconstruct their lives and culture. I've bought it but not yet read it.

As soon as I saw that Beah was scheduled to be on the Colbert Report, I googled him to find out what was up, and saw that his novel had just been released. I bought it immediately. Beah appears to be one of those truly remarkable and beautiful persons who we can only look at with wonder and shake our heads at his joy and hopefulness. I will buy anything he cares to write.

I wanted to attach a clip of Colbert's interview with Beah, but I'm having problems. Here at least is a link that will allow you to watch it. 

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/431966/january-08-2014/ishmael-beah

Finally, there are some people who one would just like to....oh, I don't know, use your imagination. What should be done with the anal-retentive person who wrote the following on Wikipedia?

Controversy

 The accuracy of the events and chronology presented in "A Long Way Gone" have been called into question, particularly the claim that Beah became a child soldier in 1993, rather than in 1995 as the timeline of events in Sierra Leone's civil war suggests.

Supposedly Beah's rescue by Unicef can be dated and one can work backward from then. But I would imagine that birth (and death) records would be poorly maintained in the midst of a violent civil war, and I would also think it reasonable that a teenager, whose parents had been killed years before, may have some dates confused in his memory. Who cares? As if the heart of Beah's war memoir is the chronology. Is this really a controversy?

It's All About Accountability

There is an interesting article in the latest New York Review of Books by Jed S. Rakoff, a Federal District Judge in New York, who asks why no high-level executives have been prosecuted for their role in the financial crisis that led to the most recent Great Recession.

Obviously, as a judge he is not presuming the guilt of  anyone. He recognizes the possibility that there may not have been any illegalities or fraudulent practices at all; maybe there was just a hell of a lot of negligence. But...

....the stated opinion of those government entities asked to examine the financial crisis overall is not that no fraud was committed. Quite the contrary. For example, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final report, uses variants of the word “fraud” no fewer than 157 times in describing what led to the crisis, concluding that there was a “systemic breakdown,” not just in accountability, but also in ethical behavior.

As the commission found, the signs of fraud were everywhere to be seen, with the number of reports of suspected mortgage fraud rising twenty-fold between 1996 and 2005 and then doubling again in the next four years....

 While officials of the Department of Justice have been more circumspect in describing the roots of the financial crisis than have the various commissions of inquiry and other government agencies, I have seen nothing to indicate their disagreement with the widespread conclusion that fraud at every level permeated the bubble in mortgage-backed securities.

The judge examines and shoots down the most common reasons given by Justice Department officials for the lack of prosecutions. Have you heard the excuse that "fraud is hard to prove?" Forget it; the Supremes have upheld the concept of "willful blindness" or "conscious disregard" as recently as 2011. Rakoff also examines a number of systemic realities which have worked to discourage prosecutions, such as inadequate investigative and prosecutorial resources and other cases with understandably-higher priorities, and he examines the unfortunate trend toward prosecution of corporations instead of the individual decision makers within those corporations.

Rakoff also points out that both the Executive and Legislative branches of the Federal Government helped create the conditions under which fraud could easily occur, and this seeming "complicity" might act to discourage prosecutors from going after individuals who would then pay very expensive lawyers to claim they were just doing what they thought was expected.

Still, fraud is fraud and Rakoff points out that the junk bond frenzy of the 1970s led to prosecutions up to the level of Michael Milken. The S&L scandal of the 1980s led to prosecutions, including that of Charles Keating. More recently the CEOs of Enron and WorldCom were successfully prosecuted. But, because of a five-year statute of limitations it is almost a certainty that no one will be prosecuted for any role in bringing about the recession whose effects are still being felt.

 In conclusion, he say that perhaps the financial crisis was not caused by fraudulent practices, 

But if it was—as various governmental authorities have asserted it was—then the failure of the government to bring to justice those responsible for such colossal fraud bespeaks weaknesses in our prosecutorial system that need to be addressed.

Just after reading this article by Judge Rakoff, I saw a story about a chemical spill in the Charleston, WV area from a storage tank owned by a company called, yecch, Freedom Industries. The number of people effected, and how serious the risks, are apparently not yet determined. But it seems on the face of it that a law has been broken. It clearly must be illegal to dump 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol (it just has a very unhealthy sound to it, doncha think?) into a river, whether intentionally or not. We'll see what happens, accountability-wise. Why do I suspect the penalty will be unjustifiably light?

In the meanwhile, imagine being told by the supplier of your city water that the only acceptable use of the water that comes into your house from the city main is to flush your toilet. And imagine your likely response to the city's plea not to horde bottled water. How many bottles of water to take a bath? one wonders. Or imagine the anxiety of the pregnant woman who was blissfully drinking city water just minutes before the announcement was made not to drink city water.

Depressingly Apt

This is a quotation from Amos Oz. He was talking about Israel in 2002, but it seems to me to be 100% applicable to the U.S. in 2013...oops 2014.

Our biggest problem is the disappearance of social solidarity. A gross egotism is developing here, that isn't even ashamed of itself. Twenty years ago a girl from Bet Shean said on television "I'm hungry", and the doorposts shook (Isaiah 6:4). Yes, partly it was just lip service, but at least there was lip service. Today, even if she died of hunger on a live broadcast, nothing would happen, apart from high ratings and copywriters using the incident for their purposes. Anyone who once naively thought that the engine of the entrepreneurs and the rich would pull behind it a long train in which the rear cars would also go forward, was mistaken. That didn't happen. The engines are moving, and the rear cars are left behind on the rusting tracks.

 The italics are mine.

Book Review Time Again

In case your New Year's resolutions involve a commitment to read more history, here are a couple of books you might consider putting in the pile.

The first, by Madhusree Mukerjee is subtitled The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II. It made me think about the way in which we select our heroes and the way in which that is reflected in our recorded histories. In a very real sense, World War II made Churchill. If he hadn't become the hero that we know today, he would justly be remembered as the architect of the horrendous WWI campaign at Gallipoli, where 43,000 Allied troops and 60,000 Turks died (not casualties, deaths)!!

But all of that is overlooked and we don't even think twice when we read that Churchill was the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. We accept without question the first sentence in Paul Johnson's biography: “Of all the towering figures of the twentieth century, both good and evil, Winston Churchill was the most valuable to humanity, and also the most likable. It is a joy to write his life, and to read about it.”

No one who reads Mukerjee's book will ever think of Churchill in quite the same way. What is sad is that many people still resist looking at our heroes, warts and all, as if that diminishes their other accomplishments.

This book starts by giving an overview of the British Raj and the Indian resistance to it. It then details Churchill's complicity in the Indian famine of 1943-44 that killed at a minimum 1.5 million people and realistically more like 3 million Bengalis. Interwoven in that story are the efforts Churchill's government made to play the Muslims against the Hindus in an attempt to defuse Indian nationalism. One of the results of those efforts (games, really) is the fact that the end of British rule brought about two countries instead of one. For more on that, see the second book, about Pakistan.

What this book made me realize, over and above the hitherto unknown historic details, is that Churchill was a dinosaur, a relic, a representative of an epoch that was already dead, even if that wasn't fully apparent at the time. He was history, in the slang sense, even as he was making it.

The second book, subtitled Pakistan, the United States and an Epic History of Misunderstanding, was written by a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S and current professor at Boston University. It details sixty-five years of two countries deluding themselves about each other. In its simplest form it comes down to sixty-five years of Pakistani deceit and outright lying and U.S. gullibility. Needless to say, the author isn't going to be going back to Pakistan anytime soon.

Although the description I just gave doesn't seem compelling enough to make one dive into a longish book, the details and insights in the book are actually fascinating.

Even if you didn't resolve to read more history, Happy 2014.

I Kid You Not

Recently I picked up a book that purports to be a catalog of common folk expressions from around the world. Most of them are just not that fascinating, although a few caught my attention and I made a mental note to remember them. Mental note or not, I don't remember any of them. I do recall thinking that the best ones were frequently Russian. In fact the title of the book, "I´m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears," is supposedly the Russian equivalent of "I´m not pulling your leg."

A friend here in São Paulo recently used an expression which, after I had him explain it, is a keeper. Carlos is a consultant with U.S. clients who, for the last year, have been exploring the possibility of doing business in Brazil. For some time it has been looking like they were on the verge of deciding against it, but their supposed "go-no" go date of December 15th passed without any decision being communicated. A few days before Christmas, Carlos was talking to his principle contact who said they weren´t going to announce anything until after the holiday. When telling me this, Carlos said "I am pretty sure the cat is on the roof."

By way of explanation, Carlso said this. Imagine you are taking care of someone's house and looking after his cat. One day the cat gets onto the roof of the house and won't come down. Then it starts to rain, the roof gets slippery and the cat falls off and is killed. About that time the owner calls and asks how things are going. And how's the cat? You know he loved this cat and you don't want to come right out and tell him the cat is dead. So you decide to break it to him slowly. "The cat is on the roof."

So Carlos was pretty sure the U.S. company had already made up its mind (and since Corporations are people these days, that is not an anthropomorphism) and didn't want to spoil his Christmas. He was pretty sure the cat was on the roof.

Great as that expression is, none of the three Brazilians with whom I've discussed it have ever heard it before, but Carlos assures me they should have.

Brazil and the U.S. have many expressions that are very similar. Today at lunch Heitor was describing a situation where someone was "caught with his pants in his hands," which as you can imagine is the equivalent of being caught with them down.

As for Carlos and the cat on the roof? It turns out that I was quite prescient. I told Carlos that, even if the clients decided not to come to Brazil at this time, they would want to keep him on retainer in anticipation of the day when they do. Ta da!! (I'm taking a bow now.)

At Least It Doesn't Use Those Fightin' Words: "Happy Holidays"

Three True Things That Are Hard To Believe

The tenth president of the U.S., John Tyler, who was born in 1790, has two grandchildren alive today. If you don´t believe me, go to Snopes.com for confirmation.

The National Football League is a tax exempt, non-profit organization. So, not only does the league pay no taxes, but member teams receive a tax break for the $6 million they pay annually to the league in dues and other fees. I know that some people consider Sunday football a virtual religion, but really. There are plenty of apologists who have offered attempts at rationalization for this, but it is still true that no other professional sports organization has tax-exempt status and the NFL has it only because of some very effective lobbying by Pete Rozelle back at the time of the merger between the NFL and the AFL.

The following amazing video is from NPR. It is a reminder that we can´t legitimately anthropomorpuhize these animals and think of them with our own set of fears. To them, this is life.