I have heard Chileans pronounce his name, but I don't know how to render it phonetically for English-speakers. The only thing that comes to mind is that the last syllable is the same as in "chetwood", but without the t.
And as for the impossibility of justice for the butcher of Santiago, yes. Several centuries of torture wouldn't touch the whole issue of betrayal of his oath of office, murdering his own elected President and so on. I would have settled for a life sentence, but the wheels of history turn slowly and he didn't live long enough. Oh well. At least things were going in the right direction, which is more than one can say of other people I won't name because I want to be allowed to enter the USA in the future.
And I don't wish damnation on him. As I said, that would be too easy. Damnation would mean he would be spared the necessity to repent and regret.
This is one of those days when my religion troubles me. That is, the fact that I don't have one. Because I would greatly enjoy to think of the look on his face when told that a merciful God would never bar anybody from Paradise forever... and that there is hope for redemption for him if he spends as many lifetimes as the people he klled in a special corner in Purgatory having his hands beaten to a pulp and then buried in lime alive, each day.
Alternatively, I think his soul can shed the awful burden of the grief and pain he caused by being reincarnated over and over and over again, first as an intensive farmed chicken, then as a non-free range, non-green calf, and finally, after many more lives spent in terror and misery and violence, as a good man spending his life helping the poor and the sick, and getting killed, tortured, ruined for it, or simply condemned to witness suffering and avoidable pain without being able to do anything for it. After many lives like that, even he might find enlightment.
Being an atheist, alas, keeps me from enjoying these pious sentiment. I just hope he really believed in his last days that the bloshies would get him. I hope while his health and strength faltered, that he lived in terror of really having to go to prison. I hope he watched nervously as progressive President after President of Chile tried patiently to unravel the fearful knot of his immunity. I hope he believed himself immortal and as such, that he dreaded the day when the fortress would finally crumble around him.
It's small consolation, but hey. The bastard's dead, at least. The world is a little cleaner, the air a little less polluted for not passing through his lungs.
And you know what, for all the misery and terror of that day, I'm pretty sure Allende lived and died a much happier man.
How come the Helsinki Complaints Choir hasn't yet made it to Sidelights? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATXV3DzKv68
Talent can be an hindrance, too. For all of my career in school up to college I almost did not study. I literally didn't know how to do it - I just had to read the assigned pages once and understand them, which was easy because I found them interesting. The one area where practice would have helped, maths, I didn't excel at because I quickly became bored with doing the exercises.
As a result, I failed spectacularly in college, in two separate fields.
I suspect I have the same problem with my writing.
Talent can be an hindrance, too. For all of my career in school up to college I almost did not study. I literally didn't know how to do it - I just had to read the assigned pages once and understand them, which was easy because I found them interesting. The one area where practice would have helped, maths, I didn't excel at because I quickly became bored with doing the exercises.
As a result, I failed spectacularly in college, in two separate fields.
I suspect I have the same problem with my writing.
Sigh. I have come to the conclusion that the only thing us seculars can do to get the attention of the religious on how we DO have morals is talking at length about them. Tedious, but necessary. Which is why now and then I write a heavily lyrical blog post about some, uh, some, I don't know, what would be religious things if I was religious. You know, you go on about the beauty of the universe, compassion, empathy, moral duty to your fellow men and things of this ilk. Reading up on Buddhism is good for this, since Buddhism ALMOST is secular anyway.
Unfortunately people have forgotten (or don't want to admit) how intensely moral socialism is. But then, if you are, say, a Communist, and willing to die for your ideals and stuff like that, you get accused of being a fanatic, driven by ideology, and so on and so forth. And you get credited with all of Pol Pot's victims, too.
Hmm. Despite being an atheist Catholic, and despite not being a fan of the Catholic Church, I am distinctly uneasy aroud this day here in London. Make of this what you will.
There is also the flip side. When some of them don't behave well, they have a whole ton of bricks fall upon them, when in fact, they may have just been the ones that did not have the extraordinary courage, the moral maturity that it takes to refuse orders, or to blow the whistle on dubious directives, AND to be the ones who catch the spotlight.
So am I the only one who remembers that there are service people doing time for behaviour that the President and the Congress have just made legal? Those guys and gals in Abu Ghraib weren't brave or untainted, they were just normal human beings too young and too clueless to know better. At a time when "knowing better" might result, well, in suicide, for example.
Nah, America is not an idea. Ideas are much stronger and harder to hit. America is a country. It's had good moments and bad moments. This is one of the bad moments. There are far worse things about it than the wound inflicted to one's romanticized views of one's country.
American citizens have ideas. Well, a lot of them. Ideals, even. But ideals need contant care and attention, need to be greased, oiled, tested, repaired if necessary. When you don't do contant manutention, things break down. Then it's a hell of an effort to get them to work again, and sometimes you just have to start from scratch.
Add to this that engines break down due to the relentless work of entroy, but ideals are brought down by powerful and cunning forces.
Yes, it's one of the bad times, all right. The world is getting darker and darker. But it's not due to any natural law, and therefore, the cycle could reverse. Will take some doing, though.
I never really knew him, but the universe shouldn't be allowed do this to people I care for - take their friends away so suddenly and cruelly. What can I say? His was a life worth living, the best kind, where people love you and miss you. But this won't help those who are grieving now.
Great giants hugs to everybody who feels the world emptier and duller and more hurtful. I wish had had better words for you, my friends.
Mike: how can it not happen?
And - of course, the bestest place this should happen is the pages for Jasper FForde's books. :-)
Brita rules ok.
OK, not really, but I am so resentful of the bottled water racket that I wish it did.
A couple of weeks ago I volunteered at a fundraising event which contemplated among other things people queueing up on a hot stair. There are few things more morally satisfying that running up and down offering little bottles of water to the thirsty.
Brita rules ok.
Oh, and in an already too long and rambling post, I forgot to add that, indeed, while it's far easier in Europe to cross a national border by just keep going in a straight line, not many people do so, while in America it's almost impossible not to encouter people of a different cultural and/or ethnic background, unless you close both eyes and go la la la with your fingers in your ear. Sometimes they are your grandparents, and sometimes they are on tv, but they are there. There are, after all, plenty of Mexicans in Dallas, just to make an example.
(Not that the IMAX feature on the History of Texas I saw in Austin ever mentioned them, or the fact that people were there before the arrival of the current inhabitants...)
(One of my sources of constant irritation is the Italian Abroad Who Will Not Eat The Local Food, or indeed ethnic food in Italy. Grrr. Indeed, parochialism is most definitely universal).
There's an undercurrent of "All Americans are pinheads (except the slans in this thread)" to this conversation that I find incredibly irritating, and that's what I'm attempting to counter
Parochialism is indeed universal, as is pinheadedness.
People from abroad, however, are generally made distinctly uncomfortable by the continuous, and often official, insistence on American preminence. The idea that America is God's chosen country, and/or that the American way is the best, is very often encountered. (Of course, this may be true of other countries I have heard about but have no first-hand experience of).
Other countries show an ingrained preference for their own ways that is natural, but the conviction that they are better than everybody else around, while not absent, is nowhere near this overwhelming and often expressed. French may be smug, and the English may have a certain polite sense of knowing they are right, but they do not inform the world if it daily. And they don't feel the need to continually reassure themselves of their pre-eminence.
It's not that "Americans" are not unaware of the rest of the world, they are in constant competition with it, in a sense. This continuos need to reaffirm one's superiority after all has to have an audience, if only an implied one (that is, Americans tell themselves how good they are, but this presumes the existence of Something Else). In fact, Americans ignore the rest of the world FAR LESS than other people - it's just that it is an abstract Rest of the World. (Abstract drops in the oil fields of reality, eh)
Of course most of the Americans I meet are on average far more knowledgable in history and languages than me or your average European. But the prevailing culture, from the recitation of the pledge at the beginnig of class to the by now almost obligatory Show of the Flag (long and complicated story here, and long discussion we could have but I will attempt to forestall by saying YouknowwhatImean, and there is the weird factoid that the State were I saw the least number of flags is Texas and the one where I saw the highest of them is Vermont), to the constant reaffirmation of how "we love freedom", to an endless stream of movies where even the exotic can only be seen through American eyes, tells a different story. (Yes, I was exposed to GWB yesterday. I still bear the scars)
This is not universal human parochialism, this is something else, and I have a suspicion that it is a top-down phenomenon.
The fact that this continual confrontation with the rest of the world is coupled with a resolution not to get to know the facts about the rest of the world (maybe because facts have a well-known liberal bias) is even more scary. Italians are ignorant. Americans are deliberately kept ignorant. In fact, the mere fact that several hundred, IIRC, people with a working knowledge of Arabic have been kicked out of the services for being gay is, well... part of the picture.
Yes, I am bashing The Fascists again. So sue me.
Two days ago I was listening to a programme on Radio 4, which is called "More than a song". In this case the song in question was "This land is your land". Several things (many of which our esteemed hosts certainly know) struck me deeply:
First, Guthrie wrote the song as a deliberate counter to Isaiah's Berlin "God Bless America". He felt that it was complacent and unrealistic, and as a matter of fact, his own song ends with a question mark (in the verses that are mostly not sung).
Second, I did not know and was shocked to learn that this song of a man whose guitar bore the inscription "this machine kills fascists" had been all but appropriated by the Right, so turning it into quite a sinister thing.
Third, when I took off my headphones (I was at work) I surprised my co-worker in the next cubicle humming it. We chatted a little and she told me that she had never heard the song, was unaware of its history and meaning, and her only exposure to it was through a version sang with comic intent on "Friends". This is an English woman.
I had a point there somewhere... or maybe not.
Maybe I'm just trying to get the tune out of my head. It isn't the worst thing to have as an earworm, but it's been two days now...
Of course, when you've had a good breeding cow shot in the face by some idiot who mistook it for a bird you tend to get a bit angry.
GRIN - quote of the day for me. :-)
My ex father in law was a devoted hunter. He even had a dog, and it turned out he was a very good hunting dog, pointing at beehives, bushes, and the like with great enthusiasm (as well as being the most handsome, funny and smart English Setter I've ever seen - I won't say I miss him more than the ex, but I miss him a lot).
The thing is, my in-law would go out hunting and somehow never came back with actual dead meat. He did come back, however, with a wounded owl, three orphaned birds whose name in English now doesn't occur to me, and several other instances of wildlife in need of help and succor.
He had his faults but I always loved him very much.
Wish I could offer technical help, but I will just observe that I have to regularly increase ML's font size, and so I am rooting for Patrick. :-)
Ashni, I've heard both rumors, but the suspect arrested in Pakistan was named in this morning's edition of the Indipendent (as Rashid Rauf). They repeatedly give the story as certain. Of course, at this stage it could be ought or nought.
Not related to this particular incident, but my skepticism suddenly increased thousandfold this morning.
Turns out that the tip-off for the "thwarting of the plot" came from Pakistan, in the form of, er, "debriefing" of a suspect arrested there.
Now... if the suicide tapes I have been hearing about surface, I am going to believe this "plot". Otherwise, this is just some poor bugger trying to give his tortures what they want - including the names of all his British friends.
Oh, and the other reason for my skepticism - apparently one of the plotters, the medical student, was a Pratchett fan. Now, why is it that I can imagine my neighbours wanting to blow me up, but I can't hold in my head at the same time reading Pratchett and blowing yourself up with a planeful of people?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 1 |
| 2006 | 39 |
| 2005 | 25 |
| 2004 | 33 |
Total: 98 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Anna Feruglio Dal Dan:
Show all comments by Anna Feruglio Dal Dan.