Keeping Zak Galifianakis out of the Situation Room
Peter Bergen, in his new book, Manhunt, describes the extraordinary efforts the Obama administration took to prevent the public from getting wind of the unfolding bin Laden raid:
The White House had canceled all tours so that tourists wouldn’t see all the unusual comings and goings. Katie Johnson, the president’s personal secretary, had scheduled a White House tour for the stars of the movie The Hangover, who were in town for the Correspondents’ Dinner, and she asked Ben Rhodes if he could grant an exception. Rhodes told her it wouldn’t be possible.
Pablo Escobar: what could have been
Robert Shiller, in his new book, Finance and the Good Society, makes an interesting case for a financial system that redirects human conflict into a manageable arena:
Pablo Escobar, the notorious Colombian drug lord, had hundreds of public figures, including a presidential candidate, assassinated, and he even had a commercial passenger airliner bombed, killing 110 people. When he was finally hunted down and killed by Colombian security forces in 1993, his mother, Hermilda Gaviria, demonstrated a strong conviction that her son, however brutal, was a good man because of what he had done for his family and the poor people in his community. At his funeral, amidst adoring throngs of his supporters, she said, “Pablo, you’re in heaven, and the people acclaim you. The people love you. You have triumphed, Pablo.” Escobar probably did have a generous side. Had his business been legal and run within a system of financial capitalism, his aggressive instincts might have been channeled into mostly productive directions.
“In a car, you are finally nowhere.”
Laura Secor’s latest dispatch from Iran contains many expressive passages. Here is one:
In Tehran, cars are the intermediate space where much of life is lived. It takes an hour to get virtually anywhere in the traffic-choked capital, a skein of alleyways and dead ends. Public places are monitored; inviting a foreigner into your home arouses suspicion. In a car, you are finally nowhere, which is sometimes where you truly want to be.
(flickr / kamshots)
Kennan on U.S. nation building in the Middle East
This 1944 passage on U.S. nation building in the Middle East from George F. Kennan’s Memoirs: 1925–1950, literate and prescient as ever, was brought to my attention today:
Those few Americans who remember something of the pioneer life of their own country will find it hard to view these deserts without a pang of interest and excitement at the possibilities for reclamation and economic development. If trees once grew here, could they not grow again? If rains once fell, could they not again be attracted from the inexhaustible resources of nature? Could not climate be altered, disease eradicated?
If they are seeking an escape from reality, such Americans may even pursue these dreams and enter upon the long and stony road which could lead to their fruition. But if they are willing to recall the sad state of soil conservation in their own country, the vast amount of social improvement to be accomplished at home, and the inevitable limitations on the efficacy of our type of democracy in the field of foreign affairs—then they will restrain their excitement at the silent, expectant possibilities in the Middle Eastern deserts, and will return, like disappointed but dutiful children, to the sad deficiencies and problems of their native land.
A dysfunctional relationship
Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder write about Pakistani cooperation and deceit in their 9,000-plus-word Atlantic article, “The Ally from Hell.” A telling tidbit:
In perhaps the most bizarre expression of this dysfunctional relationship, Osama bin Laden’s body was flown out of Pakistan by the American invasion force, which did not seek Pakistani permission and was prepared to take Pakistani anti-aircraft fire—but then, hours later, bin Laden’s body was flown back over Pakistan on a regularly routed American military flight between Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, in the Arabian Sea.
P.G. Wodehouse, on running into old classmates
In The Code of the Woosters (1938):
‘Hullo, Bertie.’
‘Long time since we met.’
‘It is a bit, isn’t it?’ …
There was a pause, and I suppose I would have gone on to ask him if he had seen anything of old So-and-so lately or knew what had become of old What’s-his-name, as one does when the conversation shows a tendency to drag on these occasions of ancient College chums meeting again after long separation.
What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech
Janet Malcolm, writing in The Journalist and the Murderer:
What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech—that Molière’s M. Jourdain was mistaken: we do not, after all, speak in prose—is something like what the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies revealed about animal locomotion. Muybridge’s fast camera caught and froze positions never before seen, and demonstrated that artists throughout art history had beeen “wrong” in their renderings of horses (among other animals) in motion. Contemporary artists, at first upset by Muybridge’s discoveries, soon regained their equanimity, and continued to render what the eye, rather than the camera, sees. Similarly, novelists of our tape-recorder era have continued to write dialogue in English rather than in tape-recorderese, and most journalists who work with a tape recorder use the transcript of an extended interview merely as an aid to memory—as a sort of second chance at note-taking—rather than as a text for quotation.
