Saturday Stories

Stories fished out from troubled waters, on a cold rainy Saturday.

Slave nation’s lucrative export of freedom monuments: A North Korea-based company is being increasingly tapped by African nations to build cut-rate large statues devoted to the theme of freedom. The WSJ has the story on the 164-foot tall statue currently nearing completion in Senegal:

North Korea is mainly known for a totalitarian regime overseeing economic failure. But it has also produced a successful export business—building monuments to freedom and independence. The statues' selling point: They are big, simple and cheap.
Over the past decade, Mansudae has built dozens of statues and monuments for cash-strapped African countries. Botswana cut the ribbon on a memorial to three tribal chiefs in 2005. Neighboring Namibia boasts a bronze of its founding president wielding an AK-47.
…
The statue depicts a father holding a baby in his left arm. The man's right arm is around the waist of the baby's mother. The three are reaching out to the sky and out to the ocean.
"Its message is about Africa emerging from the darkness, from five centuries of slavery and two centuries of colonialism," says [Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade].
…[T]he statue has been a beacon of discontent, sparking angry newspaper editorials and protests from religious leaders. The statue's sultry mother figure, dressed in a wisp of fabric that reveals part of a breast and a bare leg, has offended imams in this majority-Muslim country.
... Financing details for the project have been murky, and some taxpayers are outraged by the very idea of it when power outages occur daily and university students strike over rising fees. Mr. Wade had no budget for the African Renaissance, so instead offered a prime chunk of state-owned land in exchange, which North Korea has since resold at a large profit, he says.
…
After all the criticism, Mr. Wade is now getting some compliments. He says he recently received a letter from Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi asking how he could get a similar statue.

I wonder if Senegal’s freedom monument is visible to neighbors living in the Islamic republic of Mauritania, a country that still continues its pre-colonial tradition of chattel slavery...

Inclusive Britain: The city of Portsmouth now makes its taxi-driver license applications available in braille! Prompting Daily Mail reader Peter from Gloucester to remark:

Should I ever be in Portsmouth, I think I'll just take the bus.

Egypt-Algerian Soccer War: Last year Egyptian football fans launched firebombs at the Algerian Embassy in Cairo, following Algeria's win over Egypt in a World Cup qualifying match. France has been seeing similar spill-over violence between fans of the rival teams, violence which flared up again dramatically this past week.

Le Parisien reports that last Thursday night, a mob of 30 Algerian youths went on a rampage after Algeria lost to Egypt 4-0 in the Africa Cup of Nations final. The youth vandalized an Egyptian bar/club the paper names as the Cultural and Social Association Center for western youth, on Rue Joseph-Dijon. (A photo of the damage can be seen at Le Parisien) "They arrived a bit after the end of the match", said one of the Egyptians who was in the bar Thursday night. "We saw the window shatter... they even threw a firebomb. We were very scared. But since we didn't say anything things didn't get out of control."

The police were called to the scene but were not able to catch the youth, who left with the cash register.

The manager's son says, "I just do not understand what happened. Here, everyone lives side by side, Algerians, Egyptians... There are never any problems." An Algerian passerby seemed despondant at the sight of the local club's smashed window: "It's true [that since the start of the Africa Cup three weeks ago], relations have been tense. At Boulevard Ornano's market, some were not willing to buy vegetables from Egyptians. Stupid things like that. It's a real shame!"

[Translated from the French account at Le Parisien]

Rescued By Faith: A Haitian teenage choir singer is pulled from her cousin's home two weeks after the earthquake, when rescue teams were no longer supposed to be still searching for survivors. "We are very surprised at the fact that she is still alive," says the French doctor treating the rescued 16-year old:

[O]n Wednesday -- 15 days later -- neighbors heard a voice weakly calling from the rubble and alerted authorities, who brought in the French rescue squad. The team dug a hole to give her oxygen and water, and within 45 minutes they managed to remove her.

"They should not have been working anymore," said French Ambassador Didier le Bret. The Haitian government had declared an end to the search phase, but the French team was stubborn. "They felt that some lives still are to be saved," he said.

Reality doesn't matter: Israel is evil, harvesting Haitian organs

After writing my earlier post on the IDF field hospital in Haiti, I came across an argument from Ghost of a flea: The IDF in Haiti that gave me pause:

I have been watching IDF updates on their work in Haiti. I haven't posted them (yet) because - sadly - I think they are to miss the point. I think so much of the world hates and resents Israel precisely because of Israel's good works, precisely because Israel is good (much the same might be said of America).

Because the Enemy is evil and celebrates evil. Because there is no good deed the Enemy will not spin as self-serving or a cover for "imperialism". Because the Enemy does not see the dead of Haiti as human beings trapped by a wicked, disfunctional society but as so many counters in a game to control the world (in the name of Marx or Mohammed, the consequence for freedom - for human dignity - is much the same).

I didn't find this argument completely convincing for while there are indeed a large number of antisemites there is no point trying to talk to, there are yet some people, say youngsters misled at school, still able to be moved by exposure to reality. But then reading Elder of Ziyon, I saw a couple of quick links to the latest rendering of the age-old antisemitic blood libel:

Even as IDF travels across world to extend hand to country in need, there are those who take opportunity to spread slander, blood libel against Jewish state. Seattle resident, who presents himself as black activist, explains incendiary video he uploaded to YouTube
[...]
An American resident of Seattle, Washington uploaded a video to YouTube on Tuesday accusing soldiers in the IDF delegation to the earthquake site in Haiti of being involved in stealing organs from their patients.
[...]
The man, who calls himself T. West, fronts a group called AfriSynergy Productions, whose declared goal is to empower the black man. The video purports to present something to think about while exploiting the horrible tragedy that has befallen Haiti to recycle false claims that IDF soldiers engage in organ trafficking.

The bizarre host of the video collected praises broadcast on television channels regarding the advanced equipment and treatment the Israeli teams are providing in Haiti. After about a minute and a half of such praise, the man looks straight into the camera and made the claim that there are people operating in Haiti who do not have a conscience and are members of the search-and-rescue teams, including, he claimed, the IDF.

The man repeated the false claims that the IDF stole organs in the past from Palestinians and others. He asserted that there is very little oversight during such tragedies, and that the Haitian people must look out for their fellow citizens to protect them against international medical groups who arrived in the country "for the money." He claimed that some people were looking to make money off the tragedy.

In a conversation with Ynet, the man explained his beliefs behind the hate-filled statements he made. "I don't have anything against Israel. I have a lot against the ideology of Zionism," he explained. "We saw what you did in South Africa and with the Palestinians. Because of our history and the suffering of our people, I understand what the Palestinians are going through."

This youtube video was then picked up by the grandmasters of antisemitism, Iranian Press tv, which recently published the blood libel that was then in turn promoted by a local, Vancouver, Muslim newspaper apparently associated with the British Columbia Muslim Association (though this has been denied by the BCMA), the organization responsible for Sunni mosques in various parts of Vancouver.

I have been following that scandal with an eye to a future blog on why Muslims won't, in all kinds of situations, take responsibility for the lies other Muslims are promoting. But I'll leave the story here, for now, agreeing with Flea that many people are beyond the reach of much truth and beauty, having convinced themselves that evil is good; yet let us remember also that the foundational human experience of truth and beauty can only be blinkered, not permanently removed from any living being. Even the evil have to convince themselves that they are on the side of good. A certain amount of self-righteousness and self-justification is inescapable; that's often obvious when we look at evil people, but it's inevitable for all of us, even for those who know it's thus wise to take humility as their guide. And that is a paradox worth thinking about.

The little nation that could...

Some people are remarking on the speed and efficiency with which the Israel Defense Forces have come, from thousand of miles away, to set up a fully-equipped field hospital in Haiti. Some would see this as a particular defense of the values inherent in Jewish nationhood. I would add that it should probably teach us something of the value of any coherent national identity, of a society where there is enough of a sense of the common good and purpose - not so much a shared ideology but a commitment to a shared reality, a shared presence/existence on a common national scene - to allow people to work together in implicit trust, with much independent-minded problem solving, and hence without need of the kind of bureaucratic overload and excessive deference to more cautious procedural protocols that may be hampering other, larger nations, or NGOs.

See also the report from Friends of the IDF

As part of the IDF delegation to Haiti , Communications Corps personnel have established a fully functioning communications center in the field hospital- to be used by the IDF delegation, reporters in the area, and even the local population. Cpt. (res.) Barak Tzarom is the commander of the communications center in the field.

The communications staff was the first to arrive in Haiti , as an exploratory force. The force traversed the area and checked topographical conditions for the establishment of a communications center. Satellites and antennas were placed on the roofs of local buildings that had survived the earthquake. The staff worked with such skill and proficiency that in just three and a half hours, the communications center was complete and ready.

The remainder of the delegation arrived with the medical staff and Home Front Command personnel, who settled next to the communications center. Telephone lines were ready for use even before the first treatment was administered in the field hospital.

There is no doubt as to the importance of the communications center: it constitutes the main communication link between the IDF forces in Haiti and IDF commanders in Israel . The demand for the communication center’s services continues to be very high, for both operational and media-sharing needs.

Civilians are also using the communication tools of the center, which is currently the only supplier of internet in the area. Tzarom says: “All media from the writers and reporters in the fields, all information, is being transferred using our command center. Because the communications tools here are not sufficiently prepared to transfer information from the field we are assisting them by enabling them to do all of that from Haiti , in the best conditions possible.”

Cpt. Tzarom says that despite the courageous work, one cannot ignore the difficult images that characterize the disaster zone. “The mission always stands at the forefront, but the reality on the field is too difficult for one to stay untouched. You meet local people who suddenly became people without anything, you see them waiting on the sides of the roads that we drive on. It is impossible to describe the suffering, and the new reality that they have become a part of,” he says. “That being said, the local people are so happy to receive the assistance we are offering. In broken language they thank us for our contribution and our help. They smile at us and make peace signs at us, perhaps signing to us what it would be hard for them to say because of our different languages. These are the moments that make you understand the importance of our mission here,” he adds with emotion.

The Communications Corps staff promises to be “the first to arrive and the last to leave.” Hand in hand with Home Front Command and Medical Corps personnel, they will continue to supply communications from outside in and vice versa.

See also:

In the middle of the destruction, there was happiness. On the night of January 17th, a female resident of Port-au-Prince gave birth to a healthy baby boy at the IDF field hospital, thanks to the medical services of the IDF delegation in Haiti . A family member present at the birth suggested that the mother name her child in honor of the country that helped her. The mother was happy to oblige, and the baby boy was named “ Israel .”

Since the birth of baby Israel , two other babies have been delivered in the IDF field hospital.

If Haiti is to be rebuilt, it needs to attend to such models of nationhood, and not listen to the many who scapegoat that which works.

Radio Memories: Hope for Haiti II

This week we're presenting not just one but two posts in our -- hopefully..! -- weekly feature, Radio Memories, where we pause to listen to echoes of radio's past, from the days when radio drama, and not television, ruled the [air]waves.

[The second old radio drama we offer this week, Ports Of Call, visiting Haiti in 1935, can be heard here. I think it's worth listening to that one first, if you have time to hear both.]

The radio play awaiting below is from one of radio's most empassioned programs: Destination Freedom.

What a series! As I understand its history, it was a locally-produced show for the Chicago radio market from 1949 until 1951, and never broadcast nationally. After its cancellation a number of transcription discs laid, forgotten, in a studio closet for decades until re-discovered in the 1980s. Today the series probably enjoys wider listenership, in our time, than it did when first broadcast...

Radio drama had a tumultuous life in Chicago; many influential and popular shows, as well as influential talents would get their start in that city, but would eventually move on, following the financial siren song of the more lucrative New York and Los Angeles markets. The resulting brain-drain left things always in flux, with the conflict offering opportunity for new people to keep starting in at the bottom, since so many would be leaving at the top.

One such opportunity came to Richard Durham, a longtime freelance radio playwright, and then-editor of the Chicago Defender, an important weekly civil rights newspaper based in Chicago. His unique idea was pitched, and accepted. Begun with the expectation that the series would likely last only a few weeks, Durham went on to write 91 scripts over two years for a true radio rarity: a civil rights dramatic anthology.

Destination Freedom was carried by the same WMAQ radio station that had originated the well-intentioned but resentfully-received Amos and Andy blackface caricature series in the late 1920s, and Durham later expressed his appreciation for being given a chance to have his series idea welcomed by the local station:

"[WMAQ program director Judith Waller] was quite enthusiastic about the new characterizations that we were presenting, so I look back upon [her] now as quite an innovative promoter in the business of radio", Durham remembered in a 1983 interview quoted at length in John Dunning's 800-page reference book, "On The Air: The Encyclopedia Of Old Radio Drama".

"I had to submit the name and a short description of the character that I wanted to depict. These would generally be accepted; now and then there would be a question," he goes on to say, but also mentions that the station never pressured him to soften the show's assertive rhetoric, making each episode filled with raw emotion in a way that most radio drama of the time was not.

Durham credits two sources as literary inspiration: innovative radio writer/director/producer William N. Robson, for a sympathetic program he produced on the 1943 Detroit race riots, and novelist Charles Dickens:

"I had spent a lot of time studying Dickens... I had discovered that a Dickens character made you love him or hate him almost at once, and I used that same approach, of setting the characters as quickly as possible."

The black writer's scripts would be performed primarily by mostly all-black casts, with the occasional white character roles filled in by local white actors, in an upheaval of radio's usual casting procedures for that era. (I was pleasantly surprised to hear one familiar voice book-ending the show as its announcer: Hugh Downs, recognizeable to my generation as the former host of ABC's long-running late-night news program, 20/20.)

I can't help but perceive two contradictory emotions when I listen in to an episode of Destination Freedom: there's a clear, stark anger to be heard in these plays, yet to my ears it comes across not as anger for anger's sake... it's tempered by a hope, by a prayer, for peace, and a lessening of injustice. Maybe in the end, that's the best thing to hope for.

While the series' focus was on American contemporary figures and US history in general, there were occasional exceptions where the show ranged farther afield, and this Radio Memories post features one such episode: the October 3rd, 1948 entry that takes a look at the Haitian Revolution, with a hopeful portrait of Toussaint L'Ouverture.

One wonders what Richard Durham would make of the election of a black President of his United States, had he lived to see it. Would he say we've arrived at the destination he labored so long to push his nation towards?

Age and life experience tend to conspire to bring a cloud of fatalism to our later years, to counter the spark of youthful idealism enflaming our earlier days. A single life often sees such abundant change, in attitude as well as body, it gives us hope that similar change can befall the entirety of humanity, as well. I fear that the laboratory of history suggests otherwise; for all our "progress", people remain people, generation after generation, still just as capable of continuing cruelty as they are of repentance.

The promise of change for the better means different things to us as we occupy each extreme; for the young, change hits their life in sudden, magnificient bursts, so is it any surprise they push for change on a macro level with expectations of equally immediate results? As we age, our experience with change sees it in more gradual form, and with it comes expectations that progress, if it's to come at all, will also come gradually, slowly. Barely perceived at the time, only noticeable when life is laid out in line, like a long string. Hopefully the young can indulge the pessimism of the old long enough to learn such that they may land farther forward than they would have otherwise, bearing the benefits of the other's experience; maybe the old can forgive the young for the folly of their exuberance, for they were young once themselves.

The fire of youthful indignation drives us forward, the wisdom of age reveals how much farther we have to go, and how little we've in fact truly moved. The relation between each extreme is a messy one, but without that conflicted mess how else would we be able to stumble onward, towards the destination that forgiveness, reconciliation, and mercy would bring; a destination... of freedom.

Radio Memories: Hope For Haiti

I've often wondered what causes a nation more affliction: to possess too much history, or too little.

The attention to Haiti's tragic earthquake has put her recent and long-term history in the spotlight as well, revealing a nation reliving a cycle of enslavement, revolution and retribution. The history of injustice imposed from without (such as the indemnity French king Charles X demanded in 1825 as compensation for lost profits from a lost colony) competes in outrage with the miseries self-imposed from within. It's a textbook example of fallen mankind's inherent ability to hate "the other", how poisonous the natural urge for revenge can be, and how difficult a path it is to look for ways to forgive past transgressions.

If we possess too little knowledge of the past, the loss deprives us of the awareness of the rare good examples to follow, of the suffering of others before us who nevertheless put aside grievances in order to declare, "the past starts today". Yet knowing too much, being fully aware of humanity's endless capacity for cruelty, makes it only too easy to believe that the past is prologue, and that therefore vengeance is likely justified defense against inevitable aggressions to come. It's so hard to bury the hatchet, when everybody remembers precisely where it is buried... and why it was buried in the first place.

Haiti is haunted by its past, as so many of us are as individuals, chained to our own personal histories, to the sins we chose to commit as well as the sins visited upon us by others. In looking for inspiration to keep faith in the belief of a better future for Haiti I looked back this week to earlier examples offering reasons to find hope for Haiti, examples in the form of radio dramas.

The arrival of television in the 1950s came at the expense of an older art form, performed on radio: radio drama. Radio's theatrical tradition has been all but wiped clean from our cultural memories, rarely remembered today despite the fondness with which it was enjoyed back in its prime. Comedy, romance, westerns, and so much more was dramatized as plays for the ear, a "theater of the mind".

For the last year we've tried to present weekly features devoted to the memory of radio drama, doing our little bit to keep its legacy in mind; there is much to learn from the cultural mirror that these cultural memories have to offer us, modern-day explorers trying to imagine what we might become, through discovering all that we've been.

This week I have not one but two Radio Memories, each devoted to Haiti.

The first episode is from the evocative series Ports Of Call. The Ports Of Call show worked around an intriguing gimmick: each week the listening audience of armchair travelers would join the unnamed passengers of an unnamed ship, as they ventured ashore and visited far-away ports in Africa, Asia, Europe... and this week, Haiti.

The format of the show would normally feature the passengers visiting the local sights, markets, rivers, buildings, mountains; their comments and observations would serve as a cue for dramatized re-enactments of historical events associated with whatever highlights the local areas would have to offer. This week's visit to Haiti, however, seems different; it's almost as if the passengers never leave the boat, and the bulk of the show is devoted to recounting a singular historical anecdote, the life of Haiti's liberator, Toussaint L'Ouverture. I wonder: is this because, back then, there just wasn't anything to see or do in Haiti, due to its condition, or were the writers so fascinated with what they learned of Haiti's origins as a free nation that they uncharacteristically focused so heavily on the one incident?

The episode reproduced below originally aired in 1935, when the medium of radio drama was still in its infancy. Like television, radio's growth as a business as well as an art form brought with it a certain compartmentalization, with new shows judged and approved because they fit easily into pre-existing categories: "detective shows", "situation comedies", "horror anthologies", and so on.

In the beginning nobody had any pre-conceived notions of what the emerging art of radio drama should be, leaving open the possibility that it could be... anything. Therefore what the early broadcasts may lack in technical polish, they tend to make up for in the excitement of discovery, and their awareness that no matter what they had already created elsewhere, they were now starting fresh, exploring something new.

For a brief period in 1935 and 1936, one of the explored possibilities was the fascinating travelogue series itself devoted to exploration: Ports Of Call.

Haiti, how to help

Jay Currie has links to Canadian relief organizations.