Outis

What happens when the very poor live right beside the very rich? What happens when a black market is the only economic link between those two communities and the only civic institution they share is a corrupt police force?

It sounds almost fictional when recounted this way. (Nevermind the details: e.g., eight year-old boys firing automatic machine guns and entire neighborhoods in whcih the state chooses not to intervene.) But it’s all fact, though you’d have to rent a very good work of fiction to see it.

“News From a Personal War” is the extra feature that comes with the “City of God” DVD in the United States.

It is one of the most important documentaries I have ever seen. Perhaps, because it brings news from a frontline that could one day be ours.

I strongly recommend to you, my friends, to watch it and beg you to make your friends watch it with the proviso that their friends also watch it.

Earlier today I heard on the radio a (hopefullly mistranslated) quote from Evo Morales, the new president of Bolivia. According to NPR, Morales ushered in a series of important land reforms by saying something to the effect of his “giving the land back to its original owners.”

If accurate, it’s an astoundingly stupid piece of demogoguery.

Apart from the difficulty of resurrecting men who died nearly half a millenium ago, there is the questionable political matter of a constitutional democracy offering to expropriate land so that it can return it to an Inca emperor.

I thought of Morales’ soundbite just now as I read this section of the essay Cosmopolitans in the The New York Review of Books:

The provocation he discusses is not the Metropolitan Museum’s recent travails with the Euphronios krater but the looting and destruction of the King of Asante’s palace by Sir Garnet Wolseley in the late nineteenth century. Appiah argues not that the British were anything other than wicked but rather that their wickedness does not mean they should now send everything back. Some of the loot should be returned; but it would be of more use to Ghana if Britain would lend antiquities from other parts of the world and allow Ghanaians to see what they otherwise would have to travel to the British Museum to see.

Update: Yup, that’s exactly what Morales said.

On the Newshour a few weeks ago ago, Mark Shields called immigration the gay marriage of 2006:

And whites in this country, 30 percent of whites, want to build a wall tomorrow and they want to deport the 12 million. And if you’re going to energize them in the campaign of 2006, that’s the issue: Immigration is the gay marriage issue of 2006, to get those folks out.

Here’s Glenn Greenwald summarizing the “conservative” response to Bush’s immigration proposals:

I think a lot of the Malkin types have become bored with the whole “War on Terror” business, which provided them good, strong emotional sustenance for the last four years. But September 11 is now almost five years away. There have been no good “battles” for a long time; we don’t even pretend to capture or kill any high-ranking Al Qaeda members any more; and while invocations of “war” will always be good for some blood-rushing excitement, the whole thing seems so distant and abstract at this point. It’s just not enough any more.

They’re also clearly tired of slogging through the political and ethnic complexities of Iraq. That country just doesn’t lend itself to any morally clear good/evil dichotomies. There are no good cartoon villains to hate. Calls for increased “ferocity,” less “sensitive” approaches (”bomb some more mosques!”), and less discriminate bombings can generate some temporary enthusiasm — as it did for a day or so with Shelby Steele’s column — but Iraq is so muddled and ambiguous, and not all that emotionally satisfying. It’s pretty depressing, actually, to think about how everything they said would happen there is not happening, and trying to figure out solutions, ways out, is just not very invigorating stuff for those who thrive on Hating and Warring Against Evil.

As a result, attention gets turned to immigration — Mexican immigration specifically. It entails the opportunity to rail against “appeasement” (of Vincente Fox); to create the anti-terrorist/pro-terrorist dichotomy on which they thrive; and to demonize a clear, foreign enemy as threatening not just our economic prosperity but also our national security (the “Mexican invaders”). And if the weakened, ready-to-be-tossed aside failure, George Bush, is one of the spineless appeasers this time, so be it.

Now:

A packet of coffee is presented next. ‘We should put on the packet that it is 100 per cent Venezuelan,’ says Chávez. ‘We are going to keep increasing production every year. First for national consumption, then we are going to do something else. Maybe start exporting. Dunno where…’

Then:

In the coming years the revolution aspires to have not only much higher productivity in the industry, but also the necessary working force so that a relief shift can be created and even the total number of workers needed in the sugar industry reduced. Thus, in the future we will grind much more cane, have a relief shift, and at the same time conserve part of the labor force which is needed in our industry today where many processes are antiquated and where many machines are antiquated.

Right. Of course. And GW Bush will find WMD in Iran.

I wish I would get more letters.