Really thought-provoking (and Internet buzz-provoking) essay by Princeton’s Anne-Marie Slaughter. It earned a coveted spot on my Gchat status this week, knocking out an excellent and extremely serious article arguing that Call Me Maybe is about the euro crisis. Um, but if you pick one you should probably read the Slaughter.
My unsentimental education had begun in the 1990s in Bosnia, where I often had a Matrix-like experience. In the morning, I would wake up in Sarajevo or another cursed town that was blasted by bombs, frozen by winter and deprived of food. I would then begin my effort to get the hell out of hell. I would hope for a seat on what was known as Maybe Airlines. These were the UN relief flights that brought food into besieged Sarajevo. Maybe the shelling would be light enough for flights to land and take off, maybe not. If the flights were grounded, I could try to escape by driving along Sniper Alley and through a creepy no man’s land that constituted the only border that mattered in a nation cut and quartered by war.
Distances are small in Europe. By the afternoon, I could be in Vienna or Budapest or London, enjoying the comfortable life that Europe offered many of its citizens: hot showers, good food, clean sheets, the certainty that I would not be killed by a mortar as I slept. I had a hard time believing these altered states existed in such close proximity. The contented Europeans eating apple strudel or shopping at Harrods on those 1990s afternoons—didn’t they realize a war was being fought in their backyard? The answer was that they knew and didn’t care. Proximity isn’t destiny. Bosnia, though close, wasn’t their home. Other people were killing and dying, not their people.
”I detected a faint whiff of trolling in the latest Paul Krugman column. It’s about how Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, and Mitt Romney aren’t real fiscal conservatives because they aren’t willing to cut taxes on the rich or slash defense spending. But I think it might actually be about how Chris Christie is fat.
Exhibit A: The article itself is called “Big Fiscal Phonies.”
Exhibit B: “Mr. Christie, in particular, has been widely held up, not least by himself, as an example of a politician willing to make tough choices.”
Exhibit C: “By the way, even Mr. Christie’s own officials are predicting a major budget shortfall, just not quite as big.”
(But maybe I’m overanalyzing: after all, it’s Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, not Christie, that Krugman describes as being willing to “snatch food from the mouths of babes.”)
For your reading pleasure and for posterity, a list of some interesting reads I’ve come across this weekend:
1. “Peace Prize Follies,” by Jay Nordlinger in The American Interest. A critical history of what the Nobel Peace Prize has meant through the years. Small sample:
“The gutsiest award the committee has ever made, almost certainly, was the prize for 1935 to Carl von Ossietzky, a political prisoner of the Nazis. This risked a breach in Norwegian-German relations, and Norway was hoping to remain neutral in a second world war, as it had been in the first. Also gutsy was the 2010 award to Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese political prisoner. For more than sixty years, the committee had passed over Chinese freedom figures, but at last they honored one. Would they ever honor a Cuban one? Highly doubtful. Armando Valladares, the ex-political prisoner sometimes called “the Cuban Solzhenitsyn”, remarked to me, “If the Cuban dictatorship were right-wing instead of left-wing, we would have won two or three Nobel prizes already.””
2. “Don’t Fear the Grexit,” by Thomas Oatley and Kindred Winecoff in Foreign Policy. The authors crunch economic data that I don’t really understand to show that Greece exiting the euro (or a “grexit” scenario) wouldn’t actually be the end of the world.
3. “A New York Times Whodunit,” by Joe Hagan in New York (magazine). Very cool expose of the infighting happening lately in the upper management of the NYT. Possibly less interesting for the soap operatics than for what it says about the inherent fragility of the Times’ one-family leadership structure, as well as the ominous future of print journalism.
4. WATCH: In case you don’ feel like reading, just watch this amusing clip from the latest Real Time with Bill Maher about the confusion that comes with being a liberal disillusioned with Obama.
“Dylan picked up a guitar and proceeded to sing the song so quietly that the Everlys thought they heard Dylan sing “Lay lady lay, lay across my big breasts, babe.” Thinking it was a song about lesbians, Don Everly declined the song, saying “thank you, it’s a great song, but I don’t think we could get away with that.” Dylan did not question them about it and went on to record the track himself. Months later, they heard Dylan’s version on the radio and realized they’d misunderstood the words. The Everlys felt they’d missed a big opportunity and later recorded the song on their EB 84 album.”
this is such a “TUMBLR” thing to post (see, for instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjcq5cn0QQA) but i kind of like it.
