Category Archives: Well Worth Reading

An African Ordeal

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Paul Salopek has an amazing story, “Lost in the Sahel,” in the April issue of National Geographic. While traveling to the Darfur region of Sudan to write about the human rights crisis taking place there, he and his companions are captured by militia members.

Accused of being a spy, Salopek is beaten and detained by his government captors; it is only through persistent diplomacy that he and his companions are eventually released. The shock of his ordeal haunts the rest of the piece, which explores culture and deprivation throughout the Sahel, the strip of land bordering the souther edge of the Sahara.

Are Newspapers Even Fit to Print Anymore?

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Eric Alterman has an article, Out of Print, in the March 31 issue of the New Yorker exploring the decline of newspapers in the United States. He begins by pointing out the typical financial reasons that are often highlighted, such as the faster news cycle inspired by the internet and loss of classifieds revenue to services such as Craigslist.

Beyond that, though, he highlights real deficiencies in the way newspapers have reported over the past decade and more, culminating in their unquestioning credulity in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Much of his time is spent exploring the presence that news and political blogs have carved for themselves online (Huffington Post, not a favorite of mine, receives the most attention), engaging the myth of the liberal media and illustrating how liberal groups are using web-based communication to sidestep the bias of traditional media sources.

It’s a valuable read, presenting a useful overview of the current media landscape. It illustrates the areas where newspapers have stumbled thanks to larger forces and also highlights the spots where they’ve rotted away of their own volition.

Even More Taser Trauma

Well Worth Reading

Every week more horrible Taser stories surface (see earlier posts on the subject here and here). The victims this time were an 11-year-old girl and a 59-year-old man suffering from an obvious medical condition. The latter died.

Orlando’s WFTV.com reports:

An Orange County deputy said she had no choice but to shock an 11-year-old girl with a Taser on Thursday morning in an elementary school classroom. Deputies said it was to stop a violent temper tantrum.

The girl at Moss Park Elementary punched the deputy in the nose so hard the deputy went to the hospital. While an 11-year-old shocked by a Taser sounds extreme to some parents, other parents told Eyewitness News the girl deserved it.

Jesus.

As for the man who was murdered, the Topeka Capita-Journal reports:

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. employee Marc Luetje said he watched Saturday as a female Shawnee County sheriff’s deputy tased his co-worker Walter E. Haake Jr. three times.

“They had his keys, where was he going to go?” asked Luetje, who had worked with Haake for about 10 years.

Haake, 59, of Lawrence, who goes by “Ed,” was pronounced dead at 12:37 a.m. Sunday.

…

Luetje was one of the employees [that witnessed the scene]. In a phone interview Wednesday, Luetje said Haake had fallen down some steps at home earlier Saturday and sustained a head injury. He arrived for work at 11 a.m.

Luetje said he saw Haake at about 10:45 p.m in the break room surrounded by Goodyear first-responders. Luetje later saw Haake walking along a hallway.

“I said, ‘Come on Ed, let’s get some help,’ ” Luetje said, who added that Haake refused his offer. “He barely said anything. He was sweating a lot and walking funny. He was hunched over to the right and was taking labored steps.”

So they shocked him in his car and killed him.

Lost Lives in Iraq

Politics, Well Worth Reading

U.S.A. Today has compiled an interactive feature showing each of the 3,982 soldiers who have died in Iraq to date. This somber piece represents an important effort to present the loss at an accessible scale. Each icon lists a soldier’s name, hometown, rank, branch, duty status, date of death, place, and cause. Many feature photos as well, some in graduation gowns, others in camouflage.

A search feature enables visitors to sort the losses by categories including age (33 18-year-olds have died), gender (96 women have died), city (thankfully, no one from my hometown), and more. It’s thought-provoking, and it does a good job of evoking the losses that are easy for most of us to ignore. A similar site for Iraqis who have died would be a nice counterpart, although, sadly, it would have to operate on an entirely different sense of scale.

Would You Want Your Daughter Dating a Canadian?

Well Worth Reading

In what passes for ingenuity among yokels, southern racists have discovered a new stratagem for camouflaging their dislike of black people. Instead of using the slurs mostly commonly associated with bigotry (you know what they are), rednecks have taken to calling the irrational objects of their ire “Canadians” instead.

As Toronto’s National Post—an interested party—reports, “‘Canadian’ has apparently become a code word for blacks among American racists.” The practice dates as far back as 2003, when Mike Trent, a district attorney in Houston, sent an e-mail bemoaning “some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant.” (Amazingly, Trent maintains that he was unaware his comments carried any racial connotations, stating, “It would not be impossible or unusual for people from other countries to be on our juries.”)

For this laughable act of backtracking, I nominate him for the 2008 “But Some of My Best Friends Are Black” Award. But I also thank him, and his racist peers, for alerting me to this piece of racist code.

I would warn them, however, that they run the risk of “crossing the streams” with their slurs. Given the effort the right has dedicated to making “Canadian” synonymous with “waiting list” and “delayed knee-replacement-related fatalities,” they might be courting confusion among their base with this new formulation. Imagine the embarrassment of the politician who thinks he’s delivering a knock on “socialized” health care only to have his audience hear him blowing the dog-whistle of “welfare queens” instead.