The Weekly Screed (#886)

A morning stroll 

through the genuine news

by David Benjamin

“It’s important that people from across the political spectrum speak out about the country’s commitment to the rule of law and the core values underlying it — that the criminal justice system should be nonpartisan and independent, that a free press and public criticism should be encouraged and not attacked.”

— Peter D. Keisler, Federalist Society, quoted  in the N.Y. Times

MADISON, Wis. — “Oh God. Sri Lanka, too?”

This is what I said to myself this morning when I hit page 6 of the New York Times. Here was another moral crisis, beyond my power, that I nevertheless felt compelled to follow.

 

Every day, if you care at all about the fate of humanity, you come across a remote outpost somewhere on earth where crisis, injustice, an act of God or the iron fist of tyranny require you to pay heed and study up. I’ve had this problem since sixth grade, when Sister Caritas assigned me to do a report on Eritrea.

What the heck was Eritrea?

Of course, I found out. Eritrea was — and still is — an impoverished nation in the horn of Africa that shares a hostile border with Ethiopia. My report came pretty much totally from the Encyclopedia Brittanica. It was superficial and non-contemporaneous but thorough enough to garner an “A.” However, the long-term effect was to plant in my conscience an undying curiosity about not just Eritrea but also Ethiopia next door, Liberia on the west coast, Tanganyika, Cameroon and Upper Volta — the whole of tragic, battered, black and Arab Africa.

 

In high school, this need-to-know gnawed deeper into my psyche when famine and genocide erupted in Biafra. Africa-angst became a lifelong obligation. Not that I could do much about Africa’s travails, but I felt a duty to at least notice.

Then it spread. My newspaper compulsion — sometimes three or four a day — made me aware of heartbreak on every continent, even Antarctica (the extinction of the great auk!). I followed the Hungarian uprising — even read Michener’s chilling chronicle of that tragedy, The Bridge at Andau — and the Prague Spring, the war in Cyprus, the evacuations of Eniwetok, the overthrow of Allende, the postage stamps of San Marino, all that tsuris.

The unintended consequence of this guilty need to keep track and give a damn means that every morning’s trip through the Times (and the State Journal) (and the Post) is a sort of daily minefield where I find myself having to dredge up empathy over some new travesty, atrocity or conflagration halfway around the world.

 

Today, it was Sri Lanka, where suddenly a tiff among three corrupt big shots named Sirisena, Rajapaksa and Wickremeshinghe is threatening the whole structure of a fragile democracy. If they can’t settle their hash, Sri Lanka goes all to hell in a laksha ricebowl. And all I can do is think, “Jeez, guys! Come on!”

Even before my Sri Lanka dilemma, my conscience got bruised — on page 4 — by the mess in Myanmar. The governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar are planning to move 2,200 Muslim Rohingya refugees from a camp in Bangladesh back to the Myanmar “killing grounds” where army troops and Buddhist vigilantes slaughtered and raped 10,000 of them. The scale of this horror, impossible for me to truly grasp, is summed up in the fact that the Rohingya would rather linger in Bangladesh, one of the most wretched backwaters on earth, than go home.

 

Page 6 is another refugee story — about the “caravan” shuffling north from Honduras with futile hopes for asylum in Trump’s hate-drenched, anti-migrant America. There’s irony here, because the 5,600 US Army troops deployed to the border to stop these marauding paupers, is clustered around Brownsville, Texas. Alas, the exhausted “invaders” are in Tijuana, 1,259 miles away.

 

Also, I notice in this story that verb-challenged authors Kirk Semple and Elizabeth Malkin  used the term “sheered off,” when they meant “sheared off” and should’ve written “veered off.” Their editor missed it.

Page 8 drags me into the Israel quagmire, where hard-line defense minister Avigdor Leiberman suddenly resigned because prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was soft on the 1.8 million Palestinian hostages trapped on the Gaza strip under the heel of the idiots of Hamas. I think dejectedly of Israel, once a beacon of hope and Jewish resurrection, now devolving into a one-party national-security state eerily akin to Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary.

Which is another far-off intractable precinct that I worry about. 

Hopeless in Gaza, I flee to page 11, featuring the Times’ “populism spread.” The main story covers a seeming Brexit breakthrough with the EU by Britain’s hapless PM, Theresa May. Below that, our “populist” president is recorded tweeting junior-high insults to the French president. Emmanuel Macron’s response is the page’s best quote: “I do not do policy or diplomacy by tweets.”

To its credit, the Times on this page atones for the Semple/Malkin solecism by dropping the word “vassal” — correctly — twice.

National news, where my attention intensifies, starts on page 12 and dwells on the midterm-election recounts in Florida. The most cogent piece, by Kenneth Vogel and Patricia Mazzei, profiles Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer whose specialty is parachuting into recount battles and grabbing the situation by the throat. Usually, he wins the election. In this story, the most trenchant comment in a blizzard of competing quotes is from the otherwise taciturn Elias, who said: “We believe that at the end of this process Senator Nelson is going to be declared the winner.”

Such confidence, despite a 12,000-vote lead for Republican Rick Scott, suggests that Elias, somehow, knows what’s happening with those mysterious 30,000 undervotes in Broward County. If I were Scott, I’d be worried.

Also in national coverage: one of those epic Times exposés, starting on page 1 and jumped to encompass pages 14 and 15. Its well-spun narrative — by a team of four reporters — dissects meticulously the hubris that turned Facebook into a soulless corporate giant and a clueless pawn of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda factory. I get through half the story, doing my duty and finding no real surprises. It’s long been obvious to me that Mark Zuckerberg has the political acumen and social conscience of a garden slug.

 

My hopes for Facebook righting its course are equivalent to my expectations for peace in Israel and religious comity in Myanmar. 

On page 18, the Times buries the juicy story of Melania Trump’s snit over Mira Ricardel. I skim quickly, proposing a pox on both their houses. This story is at least funny. The next, on 19, about a rift in the Federalist Society, is both deadly serious and strangely encouraging. A few maverick lawyers in this once-lockstep conservative cloister are peddling the heresy of placing ethics above politics.

Last stop: the op-ed page, where today Gail Collins gets the whole right column. Gail is rare in the pundit dodge, because she’s amusing, on purpose. Once upon a time, a whole school of columnists truckled in humor. Reading the State Journal back in my high school days, I often found Russell Baker side-by-side with Mike Royko. Now, Gail swims alone against a tide of pomposity, touchy-feely sociology, subject-matter expertise and tendentious left/right “balance.” 

Thanks to Gail, I can close here with her best ‘graph, about Melania’s sucker punch: “Ricardel is a scary right-wing hawk who’s a protégé of the deeply scary national security adviser, John Bolton. It’s hard to say what’s more upsetting — the idea that a team like Bolton-Ricardel is supposed to be keeping the nation safe, or the suggestion that Melania is starting to dictate national security hiring decisions. But if you happen to run into the first lady on an international trip, just remember to let her have the best seats.”

Comic relief.