global

I have very little to add to the chorus of voices in the blogosphere commemorating the lives of our transgender sisters, brothers, family, and friends who are no longer with us. They enrich our own lives through the lessons of tolerance, acceptance, and love we can learn from theirs. May their memory be for a blessing.

Queers United, Feministe, Feministing, Little Light, Womanist Musings, TransGriot, Shakesville, and Feministe with another good links roundup.

From the LA Times, an article about the semi-forced assimilation of Central American immigrants to the U.S.—both legal and illegal—to Mexican ways of life, especially from the perspective of Salvadorians. It’s quite a powerful story.

Rivera and thousands of other Central and South American immigrants have left their native countries only to arrive in an American city dominated by Mexicans, who comprise L.A.’s largest Latino group and have access to most of the jobs sought by immigrants. The metropolis drives many to Mexicanize, to degrees big and small, often before they start to Americanize.

Change comes gradually, particularly through speech, as different words take over, intonations fade and verbs are conjugated in new ways. Some immigrants begin to mimic mejicanos even before they leave their homeland. They toy with Mexican curse words and awkwardly bend their accents to blend in as they cross Mexico into the United States.

There’s a scene in the terrific 1983 film El Norte in which a Guatemalan man who wishes to come to the U.S. is being instructed on how to speak proper Mexican Spanish so he’ll appear fit in: “Say it’s a hot day,” the coyote commands him. “Hace calor hoy,” he responds. “No, not like that,” the coyote admonishes, “say it’s a fucking hot day! Mexicans are always saying fuck, fuck fuck.” Expletive misuse can give away your true culture in a heartbeat.

Another such thing is your culinary choices:

Juan Carlos Rivera struggled to keep up his ruse even when the suspicious cook began to quiz him on popular Pueblan food, including Puebla’s specialty, the cemita. “How do you like it?” the cook asked.

“With pineapple,” Rivera said. Little did he know that what Salvadorans knew as caramelized sweet bread, Pueblans knew as a meat and avocado sandwich.

“I knew you weren’t Mexican,” the cook said smugly before running off to tell the manager.

Rivera was convinced he would be fired. But the manager liked his work and let him stay.

For a year, Rivera stuck around, more determined than before to fit in. He studied his co-workers’ accents, their language, their jokes and common expressions. He learned to stomach hot sauce. When the crew went out for beers, he tagged along, looking for the right time to proudly deliver a deep-throated Órale! And when the time came to apply for his second job, he sought the help of a Mexican friend. This time he would say he was from Mexico City. This time, he would learn the menu.

It’s not just food, it’s language—making sure always to use Mexican Spanish instead of Central American regionalisms: litera instead of camarote (”bunk bed”), cinto instead of cincho (”belt”), popote instead of pajia (”straw”), helado instead of sorbete (”ice cream”), papalote instead of pizcucha (”kite”), and, perhaps most damning, always making sure never to slip and say vos instead of tú for the second personal singular pronoun.

“We’re all Latinos,” she said. “The thing that brings us together is that we all speak Spanish. Everybody needs to just get used to it and get along.”

If only cultural assimilation and disappearance could truly be dealt with so easily.

If you doubted things were actually going to change under an Obama administration, here are some encouraging signs. Obama’s government apparently intends to overturn the so-called “global gag rule”:

The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush reimposed it.

In other words, if you’re an international family planning organization, and you want to receive any money from the United States, under no circumstances are you allowed to tell women that they can get an abortion, even in places where abortion is legal. This rule has caused untold damage to women and families the world round. And yes, reversing this rule must be only one part of a comprehensive strategy to address women’s and families’ health issues around the world. But it’s definitely a sign that real change can be coming.

And there’s one other development from recent days that signals change is on the way: the Obama-Biden transition team’s job page lists gender identity on its nondiscrimination page. That is wonderful, isn’t it? It’s almost as if the executive branch might become a tolerant place to work.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

—Lt.-Col. Dr. John McCrae

• The North Carolina county that Sarah Palin described as “the real America” went for Obama by a huge margin, as did the entire state of North Carolina.
• Barack and Michelle Obama have become incredibly popular baby names in Kenya—including for a twin boy and girl.
• What’s the deal with using churches as polling places?
• Harry Reid is starting the uncomfortable task of possibly kicking Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic caucus.
• Will Sarah Palin appoint herself to replace Ted Stevens if the latter resigns from (unlikely) or is kicked out of (possibly) the Senate?

So I can quit Firefox, restart my computer, and make it go faster, I present these links that I’ve been sitting on for some time:

• The New York Times rightly supports laws that block enforcement of legal judgments relating to freedom of speech in countries where the freedom of speech is not as legally protected as it is in the United States.
• The LA Times’s Joel Stein on trying to convince your elderly Jewish relatives in Florida to vote for Obama.
• A Republican Party county chairman in New Mexico thinks some racist things about Hispanics, blacks, and Obama.
• Truthdig investigates who is behind the Obsession ‘radical Islam’ DVD.
• Margaret Cho says sexist things about Sarah Palin, gets called on it, posts one of the weirdest defences ever, and promptly gets called on it again.
• This year’s MacArthur Genius from the World of Contemporary Art™ is inexplicable as befits a member of that community.
• Campbell Brown, my new hero, tears the McCain camp a new one over their sexist treatment of Sarah Palin.
• Mike Huckabee thinks John McCain’s I-won’t-go-to-the-debate-because-they-need-me-in-Washington-even-more-oh-wait-no-they-really-didn’t gambit was an enormous error in judgment.
• Finally, Jewish settlers in the West Bank—remember them?—are committing terrorism against their fellow Israelis. Terrific.

What Firefox tabs are eating up your computer’s memory today?

After Israel and Hamas (which controls Gaza) agreed to a truce six days ago, everything appeared to be going fairly quiety for a change. Then on Tuesday, rockets were fired into the Israeli town of Sderot from inside Gaza. Today, in retaliation, Israel has closed the border crossings into Gaza:

Israel said the attack was a “grave violation” of a truce in Gaza between Israel and the militant group Hamas.

Israel had been allowing more imports into Gaza since the truce was agreed, but officials said the crossings would now remain closed until further notice.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, said the closings violated the truce agreement.

Well, of course it violated the truce! But so did shooting rockets into Israel! Or did it?

The rocket attack on Sderot on Tuesday was carried out by Islamic Jihad, which said it was to avenge an Israeli raid in the West Bank, in which two died.

So it looks as if one Palestinian militant group committed an act of violence against Israel, in retaliation for which Israel punished the entirety of the Palestinian population in Gaza. So why doesn’t Hamas try to stop Islamic Jihad from committing these acts of violence?

Hamas leader Khalil al-Haya said the group remained committed to the six-day-old ceasefire with Israel and it had called on all Palestinian groups to respect it.

However, he said that Hamas would not act as Israel’s “police force” in confronting militants who breached the truce.

I’m confused. Complain about violation of the truce after Israel imposes collective punishment on Gaza, but don’t commit to holding up the other end of the truce by taking any concrete action to stop other groups from violating the truce? Hamas is using Islamic Jihad as a proxy to commit terrorism while appearing to keep their own hands clean. If Hamas won’t act as the “police force” in Gaza, but will blame Israel for violating the truce when it takes unilateral action, who will keep those other militant groups from committing terrorism and getting away with it? And how can Israel avoid the heavy-handed and inhumane response of shutting down the Gaza Strip entirely when something like this happens?

Ad matai? Will it never end?

A French court has annulled a marriage between a Muslim man and woman because she lied about being a virgin. From the Times:

The case, which had previously gone unreported, involved an engineer in his 30s, named as Mr X, who married Ms Y, a student nurse in her 20s, in 2006. The wedding night party was still under way at the family’s home in Roubaix when the groom came down from the bedroom complaining that his bride was not a virgin. He could not display the blood-stained sheet that is traditionally exhibited as proof of the bride’s “purity”.

Mr X went to court the following morning and was granted a annulment on the grounds that his bride had deceived him on “one of the essential elements” of the marriage. In disgrace with both families, she acknowledged that she had led her groom to believe that she was a virgin when she had already had sexual intercourse. She did not oppose the annulment.

Many people across France and the world, including the ruling party of President Sarkozy, have condemned this judgment as a way to use the law to invade women’s privacy and discriminate in religious contexts:

Critics ran out of superlatives to condemn what they depicted as a dangerous aberration. Valérie Létard, Minister for Women’s Rights, said that she was “shocked to see that today in France the civil law can be used to diminish the status of women”.

I guess the take-home lesson from these events is that if a woman lies about her history of sexual activity, her marriage never happened as far as the French courts are concerned. What a shocking and sad violation of human rights.

And while we here in the First World only have Taser-equipped transit police forces to contend with…

The president of the Gambia—supported by one of the countries leading newspapers—has called for all the gays to leave the country immediately. The ultimatum seems to have been directed at “homosexuals, drug dealers, thieves and other criminals”—what esteemed company the gays seem to be keeping these days, but I can’t really think of anybody who fits all these categories besides possibly Omar from The Wire.

Seriously though, this is scary shit. The ultimatum includes “a mass patrol” to “weed bad elements in society”, including hotels and other lodgings where “this kind of individual” takes refuge. And the Daily Observer a leading newspaper, is fully behind this effort:

Yes, here they go again at the Daily Observer jumping on the President’s bandwagon—we hear some of you moan. Well, moan some more because we think this President of ours keeps saying exactly what we think here at the Daily Observer.

We have said it before and we will say it again. This is a Muslim and Christian country. Both the Holy Koran and the Holy Bible condemn homosexuality—pure and simple. So I hear you say that both the Koran and the Bible also condemn theft, adultery, lying, etc.

Correct – but we do not pass laws to make theft, adultery, lying and all other evil deeds acceptable. But we tolerate them, I hear you say. Yes indeed we do, to an extent.

Tolerance is indeed a virtue and without tolerance we would have much conflict in society. But I do not want anyone to abuse that tolerance either.

Unfortunately, homosexuals do by demanding that non-homosexuals should accept their life-style. Well, the life-style in The Gambia is one based around Family and Religion. Like God’s Adam and Eve, the Family is based around Mother (female), Father (male) and the rest of the extended family. Tony Blair’s definition of “marriage” and “family” as being of whatever conjecture (even man and goat!) does not apply in our religious context.

Look, we are not interested in stoning anyone, even homosexuals. What our President is saying, and we agree with him totally (”as usual” I hear you moan!) is this: Ours is a society guided by religious principles.

Those religious principles leave no room for homosexuality. Sex and marriage in our culture is between man and woman. Sex and marriage between a man and a man, a woman and a woman, is viewed as irreligious and gross by the vast majority of our people here (just as in the West they would view sex and marriage between a man and a goat)!

So, please respect our religions, cultures and traditions by keeping your homosexuality out of our country.

I seriously can’t think of what I could say after this besides offering, for what little it’s worth, my own personal fuck you to the Gambia, its president, and its newsies—at least, those responsible for this crap.

“Now two boys have been found rubbing linseed oil into the school cormorant. Now, some of you may feel that the cormorant does not play an important part in the life of the school. But I would remind you that it was presented to us by the Corporation of the town of Sudbury to commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British. So from now on, the cormorant is strictly out of bounds!”

—John Cleese, as Humphrey Williams in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

For your viewing pleasure—and hoping it doesn’t burn indelible marks into your retinas—I give you Don Cherry’s latest horrendous getup:

Also, one note: Don was exactly right in what he said about Canada’s 5-4 overtime loss to Russia in the IIHF men’s gold medal game. Canada took a delay of game penalty early in OT which lead to the power play on which Ilya Kovalchuk scored the game-winning goal for Russia. It is absolutely ridiculous to give teams a penalty when they toss the puck over the glass from their own zone, especially when they are simply trying to clear it and it rolls on the ice or takes a strange hop or something. I remember thinking this when the rule was introduced, and Don Cherry and I—gasp—agree here. If I were Team Canada and that had happened to Russia, I wouldn’t want to win that way. It’s an awful rule that needs to be seriously revisited. (Also, someone needs to take a look at the officiating in the IIHF tournament—there were several questionable calls and quite a lot of missed calls in this game and throughout the tournament, especially a blatant too-many-men call that should have gone against the Russians.)

But all this notwithstanding, the game was a classic, and congratulations to Russia on an historic gold medal. We’re still #1 going into the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. And Don Cherry is still #1 in horrible fashion choices.

• Privacy
  • Agents at the U.S. border can search your laptop without cause, on the legal grounds that they already have an exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows them to search any paper documents you have with you. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • Los Angeles International Airport and New York’s JFK Airport will start using a new technology to electronically strip-search passengers. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • An atheist soldier sues the U.S. Army over personal threats because of his choice of religion. Privacy—and freedom of religion—advocates are concerned.
• Politics
  • A college student utterly pwns John Ashcroft during a campus appearance. If you haven’t seen this one yet, go read it; it’s amazing.
  • How does the Democratic primary end? There are three possibilities, and none of them are good for the future of the party.
  • On the other hand, if Clinton somehow manages to win, it’s payback time in Clintonland.
• Culture
  • Sun Myung Moon, worldwide cult leader and lesser-known owner of the right-wing Washington Times, was crowned as the Second Coming—in a U.S. Senate office building.
  • Richard Dawkins’s open letter to an unsuspecting victim of Ben Stein’s awful creationist propaganda film Intelligent Design-informed exposé of Charles Darwin, Expelled.
  • In Alabama, an experiment in gay hand-holding in public by the newsmagazine 20/20 generates an emergency call to 911 by a concerned citizen under the impression that laws were being broken.
  • Textbooks cost too much. What can be done about it, realistically?

This weekend I had a terrifically long conversation with my mother about the British North America Act, the precise nature of the relationship between Canada and Great Britain (read: the United Kingdom) and the Commonwealth of Nations, and the proper name for the country. The last common one that I know of is ‘Dominion of Canada’, but I haven’t heard anybody ever refer to it that way—at least not ironically. Of course, the country is referred to as a ‘dominion’ in a number of different contexts even today, yet by and large these are archaic, such as, perhaps most famously, the third verse of the original text of ‘The Maple Leaf Forever’:

Our fair Dominion now extends from Cape Race to Nootka Sound,
May peace forever be our lot and plenteous store abound,
And may those ties of love be ours which discord cannot sever,
And flourish green o’er freedom’s home the Maple Leaf forever!

But as far as most people who live here are concerned, I believe, the name of the country is simply ‘Canada’. However, on landing at YVR today, I was officially welcomed by the (Los Angeles-based) flight crew to some place called the ‘Republic of Canada‘, much to the amusement of about 75% of the plane. I suspect that this is not the short-lived Republic of Canada from the 19th century, but rather some magical mystical country without a Queen and an absurdly long list of successors.

Author, sci-fi author, scientist, futurist, inventor of the artificial satellite, co-creator of 2001, part-time philosopher and theologian, citizen of the world, formulator of one of the most memorable set of three laws since Newton or Kepler, a man whose writings had such a profound impact on me and my own writing—Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. R.I.P. Sir Arthur.

恭喜發財 — Gong Hey Fat Choi — Gōng Xĭ Fā Cái — Happy New Year!

I went over to Chinatown to see the lunar New Year celebration and parade for the Year of the Rat. There must have been a hundred thousand people there: along parts of the route, spectators were packed in like sardines three or four deep with two-way traffic trying to pass behind them between the crush of humanity and the storefronts. Also, it was chilly and raining (as usual). But those who braved it were rewarded with a spectacular event: dancers, marching bands, more dragons and lions than you could shake a stick at, and of course zillions of flags, banners, and streamers. Various politicians (and their staffs) were handing out the traditional red envelopes filled with chocolates: I collected some from the Honourable Gordon Campbell, premier of B.C. (whom I met briefly), His Worship Sam Sullivan, mayor of Vancouver, the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada (who, I believe, wasn’t actually there, but his lackeys were), and Gregor Robertson, MLA for Vancouver-Fairview. Not a bad haul, as these things go, I guess.

See the gallery of photos from the celebration.

Over the last weekend, the rules for crossing the Canadian-American border changed: Canadians must now present a passport at the border to enter the United States. Previously, they’d let you across with nary a second thought, sometimes not even demanding to see your driver’s licence or any other form of identification: if you were driving a car with Canadian plates and appeared non-threatening, they would simply let you pass. This happened to me several times; usually they just asked me (on the American side) where I was coming from, where I was going, and waved me on through. I am given to understand that when you work in a profession like one with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol or the Canadian Border Services Agency, or even security in general, you develop, over time, something of an eye for what might be trouble, and what will probably be fine. Now, of course, much of this is—consciously or otherwise—probably based on some underlying profiling (you’re white and drive a car in reasonably good shape? excellent, you’re neither a terrorist nor a drug smuggler), but that’s life, I’m told, in this kind of a world.

The one exception to this rule, in my experience, has been the crossing at Point Roberts, a small exclave of Washington State that was created when the border was determined to lie at 49° north latitude, but before they had done the mapping to see what was out there (besides Vancouver Island, which was accounted for separately in the treaty). There are only two (major) reasons Canadians go to the Point: (1) cheap(er) gasoline and (2) visiting the U.S. post office or some other shipping outlet for sending or receiving purposes. Therefore, when you enter and leave the Point, they usually know what you’re on about, and therefore the litany of questions is very specific—if it even gets asked at all.

But now, an American law passed in the wake of 9/11 is mandating that everyone provide proof of citizenship (i.e. a passport) when entering the United States by sea and, more importantly, land. As of last January—over a year ago—the rules changed to mandate passports from all passengers entering the United States by air, which people appear to have dutifully followed, taking it as one of the many necessary of unnecessary changes that have taken place since 9/11, and for better or worse, going along with it. And carrying a passport for flights between the U.S. and Canada is a good idea anyway; it simplifies matters when you go through customs and immigration control—remember, they really are two separate countries.

I’ve been using the word passport relatively interchangeably with the phrase proof of citizenship; I should clarify that what is actually required is proof of identity and citizenship. A passport proves both those things, but so do some other things, which are listed in the NPR story linked to at the beginning of this post. A NEXUS card, for example, will serve these functions just as well as a passport, though I once tried to use my NEXUS card as identification in San Francisco Airport, which though totally legal, didn’t quite work because the agents I was talking to had no idea what it was. The other relatively new—and potentially quite scary thing that you will soon be able to use is an enhanced driver’s licence, which are now being rolled out in both British Columbia and Washington State. I will skip lightly over these except to note that people of the privacy-advocating sort are worried that these licences are the first step toward a national ID card in both Canada and the United States. But this is a discussion for another time.

What is amazing, though is that what with all the new regulations on the books, the U.S. border guards are not enforcing these policies. Let me repeat that: these new laws say you have to present a passport at the border, but those guys who work for the Department of Homeland Security will not turn you away if you don’t have a passport. They’ve pushed back the date on enforcement of law by at least eighteen months, meaning that it will come into effect in July 2009 at the earliest; until then you can expect to receive ‘an educational flyer’ when you cross the border sans passport. There appears to be some question, furthermore, as to the next step—that is, whether or not to press on with the regulations at all. Leading the opposition are three U.S. Senators: Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), and Ted ‘Series Of Tubes‘ Stevens (R-Alaska). These politicians all come from border states, surprise, surprise—guess whose economies are going to lose money if cross-border traffic is hindered further than it already is.

But one of the most salient objections I can think of—and one that, to my knowledge, hasn’t really surfaced yet—is that we’ve been hearing from the Bush administration, for years and years, how insecure and unsafe America’s borders really are, and how desperately needed are new measures to strengthen border security. Well, the new measures just came into place, and guess what? Bush’s own government isn’t enforcing them! What blinding hypocrisy and idiocy!

Excellent news today for gay rights in the States! First, an appellate judge in New York has ruled that the state must recognise marriages performed in Canada between two people of the same sex. Excellent news for both Canadians in America and American gays who came up here to get married when Canada legalized gay marriage earlier this decade. Of course, the judgment recognises that a law might eventually be passed that would deny recognition to those marriages, but until such a law is on the books the marriages must be legally recognised in New York. This is a terrific victory, because it marks the first time any entity at the Federal level in the United States has afforded recognition in this kind of situation.

Second, and more legally interesting, a judge in Oregon has thrown out a lawsuit challenging a law passed by the legislature last year allowing the official recognition of domestic partnerships, allowing the law to come into effect immediately. The point being argued in court was whether or not one has a constitutional right, if one signs a petition, to have that signature officially tabulated. There had been a petition circulating in Oregon to put a referendum before the voters to ban any other form of union between two people of the same sex (read: gay marriage), but it barely did not receive enough signatures to appear on the ballot. The judge concluded that it is not a constitutional right to have one’s signature counted on a petition, which sounds like a counterintuitive position, but it is very soundly argued in the (surprisingly readable and understandable) ruling (PDF). Here’s the interesting bit from the ruling (pages 15–16):

I believe the State, through a variety of sources, has demonstrated to the average signer of a petition that it’s not making any promise that your signature ultimately will be counted. Some of those we’ve talked about. Some have to do with the fact that when you sign a petition, there are any number of ways in which your petition may never see again the light of day.

Now, admittedly, some of the most common of those have nothing to do with anybody acting on behalf of the State. The chief petitioner can simply give up and go home or raise some question in his or her own mind about a particular sheet and throw that sheet away just to save themselves the trouble of a challenge later. There are any number of ways when you sign a petition that you have no reasonable expectation that the State is promising it will make it all the way to home plate. …

If you’ll forgive kind of a folksy example, if one of my kids claims I promised them a Lamborghini when they graduated from high school, the fact that I cannot do so is some evidence that I never promised I would. And if the State is being said to have promised something that would be extraordinarily difficult to do, that’s some evidence, in my view, that it never promised it in the first place; it’s not within the original entitlement.

Legally, at least from the point of view of the common law, impossibility excuses a party from failing to fulfil a contract. But there was no contract here; the specific objection raised by the plaintiffs is that the state denied due process to those people who signed the petition expecting their signatures to count, and in doing so violated the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, the ruling found that the state never created the entitlement to having their signatures counted in the first place.

The upshot is that gay people can now go ahead and register their domestic partnerships in Oregon and receive many (but not yet all) of the benefits conferred by marriage in other situations. Thank goodness for two happy outcomes to cap off the week.

On 13 February, Australia is going to issue its first formal apology to its aboriginal population, the AP is reporting. The newly elected Labor government is making this their first item of official business, according to Jenny Macklin, Minister of Indigenous Affairs. Furthermore, an anonymous citizen has providing funding for the writing of ‘Sorry’ in the sky above Sydney on Australia Day, which was over the weekend on 26 January.

I guess some sense of national, collective responsibility is one of the side effects of electing liberals to your government. Or at least it should be.

According to the recent report of an FBI agent who interviewed Saddam Hussein after the former leader of Iraq was captured in 2003, Iraq wanted to trick the rest of the world into believing that it had weapons of mass destruction to intimidate Iran:

Saddam Hussein let the world think he had weapons of mass destruction to intimidate Iran and prevent the country from attacking Iraq, according to an FBI agent who interviewed the dictator after his 2003 capture.

According to a CBS report, Hussein claimed he didn’t anticipate that the United States would invade Iraq over WMD, agent George Piro said on “60 Minutes,” scheduled for Sunday broadcast.

“For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that (faking having the weapons) would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” said Piro.

Kind of like Israel, but in reverse, I guess—trying to make a deterrent out of making everybody think you have WMDs when you actually don’t.

The report will show up on tonight’s 60 Minutes, but I plan to be watching the rebroadcast of the 2008 U.S. figure skating championships, which will be sure to hold my interest for much longer, for two (related) reasons. One, who the hell remembers or cares about weapons of mass destruction? WMDs as a justification for war with Iraq went out of fashion about six months after the invasion, when none were found. At that point, it became all about turning Iraq into a democracy, ending the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and other reasons that seemed to come out of the blue. So I have to wonder how much impact this is going to have on either the political policy or the public consciousness of the United States. (Though I might look for Bush to throw in a veiled dig or two at this report in tomorrow night’s State of the Union speech). And second, this report doesn’t change anything: Hussein was already executed back in 2006, the U.S. military is still bogged down in a war in Iraq with no end in sight, and at this point what does it matter whether the initial justification was right or not? Not that it would have changed anything back during the run-up to the war years ago anyway…

Update: Think Progress has a video and transcript of the original interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes here.

The heads of far-right political parties in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, and France are coming together to form a ‘pan-European “patriotic” party’. The leaders of the new party, according to the BBC, ’said their aim was to defend Europe against “Islamisation” and immigrants’. Also, the approved euphemism for this appears to be ‘patriotic’.

I have two—admittedly snarky and probably unproductive—thoughts: One, this might give Silvio Berlusconi some pause from his recent plotting to retake the government in Italy after Romano Prodi’s resignation. If this pan-European far-right party eventually reaches into the Italian right wing, it might draw away some support from that base. And two, is it possible that the Belgian far-right thinks this will help the country with its ethnic problems? They still can’t form a government: could the answer possibly lie in a reaffirmation of the supremacy of white Christians? They can all still agree on that, right?

Today’s New York Times has an article predicting that Turkey will introduce changes to a law known as Article 301, which forbids publicly insulting Turkey and ‘Turkishness’, among other things. These restrictions on free speech constitute one of the most significant barriers to Turkey’s acceptance, in general, by the community of nations as a modern enlightened country, and in particular to its chances of getting accepted by the European Union. Several high-profile cases involving Article 301 have brought international attention to focus on Turkey, most memorably the prosecution of the Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, who had mentioned in the Swiss Das Magazin that ‘thirty thousand Kurds, and a million Armenians, were killed in these lands, and nobody dares to talk about it’.

But the alterations that the government appears ready to make to Article 301 only go so far, the New York Times reports. Given the conservatism and nationalistic pride of many modern Turks, the government will not abolish the law; they will only ‘weaken’ it to try to reduce frivolous prosecutions under it. Furthermore—and possibly more importantly—the whole corpus of laws restricting free speech are spread over the legal code, and some of them are not even part of it. Liberals in Turkey apparently wanted the government to take some action to clean up this confusing legal patchwork, but the government won’t go there.

As I have noted previously, a nation cannot truly be called a democracy if it restricts the free speech of its citizens. If Turkey has any aspirations to being known as a democracy, in any meaningful sense of the word, it will have to give up these insulting and xenophobic restrictions on questioning the official history of the state. Let’s hope that this weakening of Article 301 is only the first step in a process leading to true freedom of speech in Turkey.

A couple of sources in the (Western) media are starting to pick up the story of Wei Wenhua, a blogger who was beaten to death in central China. Municipal inspectors—a sort of minor league city-level police force—were engaged in a confrontation with villagers over government waste-dumping in the vicinity. The confrontation turned violent, with inspectors beating villagers. Wei took out his mobile phone to use its camera to take pictures of the confrontation, whereupon fifty inspectors descended on him, beat him for five minutes, and rendered him unconscious. He was taken to hospital but pronounced dead on arrival.

CNN is reporting that twenty-four inspectors were detained and over a hundred others are under investigation, but it seems clear that even this swift response, obviously designed by the Chinese government to try to prevent civil unrest, is not having the desired effect. People around the world, but especially in Internet-restricted China, are using the Internet to express their outrage:

After the Web site sina.com published news of Wei’s beating, readers promptly expressed their outrage. In one day alone, more than 8,000 posted comments. Bloggers inside and outside China bluntly condemned the brutal killing.

“City inspectors are worse than the mafia,” wrote one Chinese blogger. “They are violent civil servants acting in the name of law enforcement.”

Another blogger asked, “Just who gave these city inspectors such absurd powers?”

It’s not exactly news that the Chinese government has an awful record when it comes to free speech on the internet, or an equally awful record on police and government treatment of its own citizens. The perspective article linked to above contains several examples of criticism from various ranks of people in China: from academics to bloggers to regular old folks, there seems to be a significant amount of resentment at this scandal. It won’t be a catalyst, and this event won’t be a significant trigger, for large-scale changes in governmental policy. But hopefully Wei Wenhua won’t be forgotten, and his cause will be taken up and championed by people both in China and in the rest of the world.

Canada defeats Sweden 3-2 in overtime to win the gold medal in the 2008 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships. This is their fourth straight gold medal, won by one of the best junior teams the country has ever seen. The Canadians dominated the game in the first two periods, but the Swedes tied it in the last period with a beautiful goal on a set play off a face-off and then a goal with under a minute to play and the Swedish goaltender pulled. Excellent and aggressive play from all the Canadian lines, especially under the game’s MVP, Brad Marchant, combined with superb goaltending from the Canadian goaltender Steve Mason, who rightfully won the tournament MVP award, simply pulled together to outdo the Swedish team at the end of the game.

Congratulations to the Swedish team, who are bringing home their first medal in twelve years, and congratulations to the Canadian U20 juniors on this terrific outing in this year’s WJHC—we hope to see you do great things in the NHL in the coming years, and in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver!

Those of you not in Canada, and especially not in Vancouver, may not have been getting inundated with Robert Dziekański news—here, it’s been only slightly less covered than the Robet Pickton murder trial. In a nutshell, Dziekański, a Polish immigrant, was kept waiting in Vancouver International Airport (YVR) for ten hours before he apparently became agitated, inducing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to shoot him repeatedly with Tasers. Much of this incident was captured on video (warning: huge trigger potential) by one of those nefarious cell phones that have the unfortunate tendency to record things that many people—law enforcement certainly included—would rather keep out of the public view. Dziekański died at the scene in YVR.

His death has rightly sparked outrage across the country, rising to the level of an international incident. It has prompted calls for reviews both specifically of how Dziekański’s case was handled and of how RCMP and other law enforcement agencies use Tasers in general. Every week, it seems, there’s another Taser-related death being reported in the media; recently Amnesty International figured that there had been at least 17 deaths directly linked to the use of Tasers since the weapons were introduced to Canadian law enforcement. I even heard a suggestion—a facetious suggestion, of course, but one that resounded particularly strongly among my local friends—that the newly introduced mascots for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver didn’t really represent Canada or British Columbia as they exist today. What was the proposed alternative? A Mountie with a Taser. Bienvenue au Canada!

Seriously, though, this really does touch upon issues of language politics. Today, YVR released a preliminary report on how they would spend over a million dollars to improve security in the immigration area of the airport. If you’ve ever been to YVR—or pretty much any Canadian airport—you’ll know that all the signage is in both English and French, and at YVR there are many signs that are also printed in Chinese characters. Aside from the obvious ‘what good does French do’ question, which becomes somewhat more relevant the further away from Québec you go, a better question is ‘why aren’t signs in the Immigration section posted in more languages?’ This is something I’ve always wondered—even large airports in the United States, a country in which many states have notoriously anti-foreign language laws—post signs and employ interpreters for many different foreign languages. The rationale is obvious: how are you going to communicate with an immigrant—or even a resident—who doesn’t speak English if you don’t follow these steps? Yet YVR has been shamefully lacking in this department: although you have to be bilingual to work in the federal government, and therefore be a border guard/customs agent, ‘bilingual’ in this case means ‘both English and French’, and French is really not all that useful at the busiest airport on the North American end of the Pacific Rim.

Hopefully YVR will follow through and begin to employ more people with more varied linguistic skills than simply the government-mandated French and English. Such ‘biligualism’ across Canada, as advocated and established by the former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, is a fine thing. Now that the country’s got it, it’s time to expand to other languages; hopefully we can avert the next Robert Dziekański with proper communication.

All those of you who are concerned about theatre, or the developing world, or theatre in the developing world, must listen to today’s Q from CBC Radio 1. The middle item is an interview with Debebe Eshetu, the most famous actor and director both on stage and in film from Ethiopia. (He was in Shaft in Africa, which has been his only real exposure in North America before now. I certainly had never heard of him. But he’s really big in Ethiopia.) In the interview, he talks about the state of theatre in Ethiopia with specific reference to the political climate there. Eshetu stood for election a few years ago as part of a party of reformers and after sweeping the election results was subsequently thrown in prison for 22 months for treason. He is now in North America working on producing some material he wrote in prison and publishing his memoirs.

In response to the question of whether he is afraid of returning to Ethiopia after his travels abroad:

‘No matter what, I will still go back, because I have promised the Ethiopian people—not only the artists, but the Ethiopian people who fought for my freedom—those who are here in Canada, in the United States, in Europe, in the Scandinavian countries—Ethiopians in the diaspora have really fought for us. They fed our family. They liberated us. They fought to the court(?). They were out on the streets with the cold weather in winter when it was thirty-five below zero. How can I forget that? And what will I say to—what will I say to my children when they say, “Why did you run away?” Will I tell them, “I was scared”? No, I can’t. I have to go back.’

Asked for his thoughts on the future of theatre in Ethiopia:

‘I think each individual artist must start fighting for his own freedom. We must be able to communicate with the public, not on [sic] a translated play, but on the actual fact that is happening in the country. We must teach the public what they should do to get their freedom, to be able to live in their country, to be able for the children to go abroad, get their education, and go back home instead of staying outside their country. They should start developing their country. So the artists have the major responsibility, because they have a straightforward communication. Because they have the respect of the people, the people listen to the artists. The artists are part of the human society.’

The podcast of the whole show can be downloaded here; the bit with Debebe Eshetu begins at 16′ 05″.