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“Weeds Never Die”

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Daniel Ortega, Again in Power

Daniel Ortega, Again in Power

You remember him, don’t you? When Ronald Reagan was still in his stirrups, he did everything in his power to oust Daniel Ortega from control in Nicaragua by aiding the “patriot” Contras. Well, Reagan failed. Ortega was out for a while, but he’s back again. As the Nicaraguans say, “hierba mala nunca muere”—“weeds never die.”

Ortega’s latest gambit is to build another canal across Central America (see map following), but this time through Nicaragua. The idea had been considered once before, but rejected because of the nearness of the very active volcano Momotombo (see below). In fact, when the Panama Canal was cut through, in August 1914, Nicaraguan President General Emiliano Chamorro signed a treaty with William Jennings Bryan to the effect that the U.S. was granted the exclusive right—in perpetuity—to build a canal through Nicaragua.

Momotombo

Momotombo

Well perpetuity is over and done with. Ortega has cut a deal with the Chinese to build a Canal to be 100% owned by them, except that with each passing year, an additional 1% of the ownership rights would pass to the Nicaraguans. The company building the canal, called the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (or HKND for short) is led by Wang Jing, who has no particular experience cutting canals. What is Nicaragua paying for the venture? Nothing. What is Nicaragua getting for the canal? Initially, just about nothing. What is China getting for the canal? A one hundred year concession in which majority control passes to the Managua government after 51 years. Many think that Ortega is getting a large cut of the action for making the deal, but no one knows for sure.

According to Dora Maria Téllez, head of the opposition Sandinista Renovation Movement:

The Chinese must be throwing themselves a party right now. Since the concession doesn’t specify geographic limits, it effectively gives them the whole country to do what they want. What do they have to pay in taxes? Nothing. What control does Nicaragua have? None.

Adán Aguerri, head of the Superior Council on Private Enterprise (COSEP), fielded a question on what this deal would do to Nicaragua’s sovereignty: “In a country where anyone can come and stomp all over us tomorrow, what’s sovereignty?”

And what about the Monroe Doctrine which we all learned about in school? According to Secretary of State John Kerry, it is no longer operative.

I’ll leave you with another Nicaraguan term: vendepatria, or “seller of the fatherland.”

 

Routes Being Considered for the New Nicaraguan Canal

Routes Being Considered for the New Nicaraguan Canal

For more information about this subject, read Jon Lee Anderson’s article entitled “The Comandante’s Canal” in the March 10, 2014 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

 

So You Think It’s Good for You?

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Soybeans

Soybeans

Unfortunately, we Americans tend to pay far too much attention to the news media, not only when it comes to straight news, but also feature stories about food and health. We’ve all seen the stories: Avoid ill health by drinking sugarless sodas, followed by how artificial sweeteners are worse for you than sugar. For decades, articles are trumpeted the benefits of protein from soybeans. Now there are an equal number of articles blaming soy for feminizing men by giving them man-boobs.

The number of news villains in our diet have included eggs, fats, tomatoes (long ago thought to be poisonous), cheeses, and smoked meats. I am reminded of the scene in Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) in which two doctors are discussing Miles Monroe (played by Woody):

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.”

Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.

Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or… hot fudge?

Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy… precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

Dr. Melik: Incredible.

Maybe deep fat, steak, cream pies, and hot fudge are bad for you, but I have my suspicions about wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger’s milk—which may be no better.

I have come to the conclusion that the best thing to do is to not get into a food rut. A bad food rut can include salads just as much as it could include cheeseburgers and fries. Eat meat. Eat eggs. Eat fruit. Eat vegetables. But know this: There are no magic foods that will cure what ails you. That is pure snake oil.

 

Caudillismo

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Juan Manuel de Rosas Ruled Argentina 1929 to 1952

Juan Manuel de Rosas Ruled Argentina 1929 to 1952

When we think of South America, we usually think of the military dictators, or caudillos, who seemed to rule most of the time. Why is it that the continent has had so much difficulty transitioning to a democratic form of government? I think the reason goes all the way back to the expulsion of Spain from her colonies. The Spanish forces were sent back, but the criollos were still very much in charge. They were mostly white, with rarely some Indian admixture, but they held the reins of power. Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and Bernardo O’Higgins were all criollos. All the big landowners, almost without exception, were criollos. Only rarely did an Indian come into power, and then usually only for a short time.

The armies of the South American countries were, until late in the Twentieth Century, pretty much in charge. They acted as a kind of Praetorian Guard to their favorites, who were usually the caudillos. God help them, however, when the favorites were no longer favored. Eric Lawlor in his excellent book In Bolivia enumerates the country’s heads of state who met violent ends:

The list of presidents and former presidents to die violently is extensive. Pedro Blanco was assassinated in 1829; Sucre in 1830; Jorge Córdova in 1861; Belzú in 1866; Melgarejo in 1871; Augustín Morales in 1872; Hilarión Daza in 1894; and José Manuel Pando in 1917. Nor did the tradition end in 1946: President René Barrientos died in a highly suspicious helicopter crash in 1969, and former President Torres was gunned down in Buenos Aires in 1972. Becoming chief of state in this country often amounts to signing one’s death warrant.

Actually, the most spectacular Bolivian President’s demise was that of Gualberto Villaroel, who was hanged by a mob on a lamp post across the street from the Presidential Palace in 1946. As Lawlor write, “A sobering sight for incumbent presidents, it [the lamp post, which still exists] may explain why so many Bolivian communities are still without streetlights.”

Bolivia might be the most spectacular bad example of misgovernment, but virtually every South American country has its own bad examples, from Juan Manuel de Rosas of Argentina, who set some type of caudillo longevity record; to General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte of Chile; to Ramón Castilla y Marquesado of Peru; to José Antonio Páez of Venezuela; to José Artigas of Uruguay. Of the independent countries, Chile and Brazil had the fewest; and probably Bolivia had the most.

There is a nice PDF file on “The Rise of the Caudillos,” which deals with the issue in outline format.

 

 

 

“Mildness and Complaisance”

Terence

Terence

However well a man may have calculated his scheme of life, still circumstances, years, experience, always introduce a new element and teach new lessons. You find that you don’t know what you thought you did know, and what you thought of primary importance that in practice you reject. That’s what has happened to me. The hard life, which up to now I have lived, now that my race is almost run I renounce. And why? Hard facts have taught me that a man can have no better qualities than mildness and complaisance.—Terence, Adelphoe

What the Democrats Don’t Get

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Do What’s Right First, THEN Ask for Money

Do What’s Right First, THEN Ask for Money

I am daily besieged by dozens of almost identical e-mails asking me for support. At first, they want me to just sign a petition. That’s fine with me. Then they hold out the tin cup, asking me for money so that the evil Koch Brothers, the Nazgul of our own time and place, do not hurl us all into a pit of unrelenting misery.

Look, I hate the Koch Brothers as much as they do—but I also hate television. All these Democratic-aligned organizations are doing is arranging for millions in political ad buys on a medium which I do not support, and for which I have active contempt. I am also getting a little bit suspicious: Just whom are these organizations supporting? Is it the issue named? Or is it the collective broadcast and cable television networks? And has anyone ever checked to see whether there are kickbacks taking place?

That reminds me of a snippet I read last night from Christopher Isherwood’s South American travel journal Condors and Cows: “In Bogotá, he says, the milk was always sold diluted with water. One day, a pure-milk dairy was started but soon went bankrupt. It had been deliberately ruined by the directors of the water-works, who feared a serious drop in water-consumption.” In other words, are the TV ad people involved in these movements as a way of drumming up business?

These are questions that need to be asked, because I, for one, am reluctant to respond to any of these ads—regardless of my political beliefs.

Dreams at High Altitude

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A City Surrounded by Mountains

A City Surrounded by Mountains

The other night I dreamed of Bolivia. I was in La Paz, one of the country’s two capitals—the other is Sucré in the South. I was trying to navigate between two locations within the city, but all I had was a two-dimensional street map that didn’t give me any idea whether I had to go uphill or downhill. The Lonely Planet guide to Bolivia lists the altitude of La Paz at 12,007 feet (3,660 meters), but isn’t that just an average? Even higher than La Paz is the erstwhile suburb of El Alto, which is, at 13, 620 feet, not only the highest major metropolis in the world with a million people, most of them Aymara, but also is home to the La Paz’s international airport,the world’s highest.

I am obsessing about La Paz: It is a city that pops up in my dreams because it is set in a huge bowl under several conical volcanoes, the most spectacular of which is Illimani at 16,350 feet. I keep thinking of traveling up and down the city by taxi and on foot, gasping all the while because of the high altitude.

Currently, I am thinking of starting my vacation in Lima and traveling through southern Peru to Lake Titicaca and then on to La Paz. From there, I plan to fly “open jaws” back to Los Angeles. That saves me time and money from having to deadhead back to Lima.

The big question is my susceptibility to Soroche, or altitude sickness. If, upon arriving in Cusco, I appear to have the beginnings of either HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema) or HACE (high altitude cerebral edema), I will turn around and return to Arequipa, going on to Tacna (in Peru) and Arica (in Chile), possibly as far as Antofagasta. In that case, I would deadhead back to Lima and fly home from there.

So if that alternate scenario takes place, I would have to have a flight from La Paz to Los Angeles that I can cancel if necessary. Is that possible? It remains to be seen.

Addendum: These two quotes from Christopher Isherwood’s South American diary, The Condor and the Cows, add an eyewitness’s observations to the city :

Sixty miles from the lake [Titicaca] the plain suddenly ends. You look over its edge into a deep horse-shoe valley and there is La Paz, fourteen hundred feet below. The view makes you gasp, for it is backed by the enormous snow-peak of Illimani, which fills the sky to the south. Illimani is rather higher than Mount Pelion would be if it were piled not on Ossa but upon Mont Blanc.

Believe it or not, I actually had the following scene in my dream:

Many of the side streets are so steep that you could scarcely hold your footing on the worn pavement. The Paceños have learned to slither down it in long strides, like skaters. What with the altitude, the gradients, the scarcity of elevators and the shortage of taxis, you spend most of the day painfully out of breath, and envy the Indians, whose enormous lungs enable them to trot uphill without the least sign of strain.

 

Anglo Saxon Attitudes

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Originally, the Phrase Comes from Through the Looking Glass

Originally, the Phrase Comes from Through the Looking Glass

The following scrap of dialogue appears in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. ‘I see somebody now!’ she exclaimed at last. ‘But he’s coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!’ (For the messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)

‘Not at all,’ said the King. ‘He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he’s happy. His name is Haigha.’ (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with ‘mayor.’)

Angus Wilson wrote a famous satirical novel by the name of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes back in 1956, but I am going to put a slightly different spin on the phrase. I am somewhat surprised that most Americans only read books originally written in English. My late friend Norman Witty was one such: The only exception was for some books written in French, and then he would only read them in French.

There is an Italian phrase—“traddutore, traditore”—whose meaning is that translators are all traitors. I don’t believe that. Some translators are notoriously inept, but they usually get hammered in the reviews. I remember one such translator of Proust’s Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of his In Search of Lost Time, which was translated by James Grieve into In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement suggested that one go back to C. K. Scott-Moncrieff’s somewhat prissy rendering which is nearing its centenary.

In my time, I have read many archaic translations, such as Constance Garnett’s of the novels of Dostoyevsky, Ellen Marriage’s of Balzac’s The Human Comedy, and even the dreadful Peter Anthony Motteux translation of Cervantes, which dates back to 1712. It didn’t matter that much. Even a bad translation will help one to appreciate the greatness of Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Cervantes—or anyone else for that matter. There are probably some old chestnuts around that are truly terrible, such as the Portuguese-English phrasebook that Mark Twain published because of its frequent howlers.

Now what I mean by Anglo Saxon Attitudes is a kind of linguistic provincialism, that eschews works from other countries because they were not written in English. I will grant you that English and American literature are remarkably wide, but so is that of other countries. My life would have been relatively impoverished if I had not read the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Euripides, the Icelandic sagas, Gyula Krúdy (a fellow Hungarian), Orhan Pamuk, Mo Yan, Kobo Abe, Stanislaw Lem, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Honoré de Balzac, Jorge Amado, or Fernando Pessoa. I suspect that approximately half the books I read were translated from other languages. So I didn’t get the same from them as a native speaker of the original languages, but I venture I got at least 75%, and that 75% has meant—literally—the world to me.

It’s Greek To Me

Oedipus & Sphinx

Oedipus & Sphinx

Nothing grows clearer to me year by year than that the nature of the Greeks and of antiquity, however simple and universally familiar it may seem to lie before us, is very hard to understand, indeed is hardly accessible at all, and that the facility with which the ancients are usually spoken of is either a piece of frivolity or an inherited arrogance born of thoughtlessness. We are deceived by a similarity of words and concepts: but behind them there always lies concealed a sensation which has to be foreign, incomprehensible or painful to modern sensibility.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, Book III

I Run Into Charles Keating

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S & L Fraud Meister Charles Keating (1923-2014)

S & L Fraud Meister Charles Keating (1923-2014)

When Charles Keating died in Phoenix last week, I thought of my meeting with him in Iceland (of all places) in August 2001. I was staying at the Foss Hotel Skaftafell in Svinafell (see photograph below), about two kilometers south of what was then the Skaftafell National Park, and is now merely part of the giant Vatnajökull National Park that occupies most of the country’s southwestern quadrant. Since I was traveling alone and without camping gear, it was the only place I could stay in walking distance of the park without roughing it.

I was sitting in the hotel dining room, close to a large center table where there was a large, noisy group who were swilling large amounts of imported wine. (What other kind is there in Iceland?) The oldest member of the group excused himself for a rest room visit, while his friends talked about him behind his back. It was then I learned the man was the infamous Charles Keating, whose leadership of the American Continental Corporation and the Lincoln Savings & Loan Association led him afoul of the law, more so because he had tried to suborn five legislators (the so-called “Keating Five”) into letting him off scot free. It didn’t work, as in December 1991, he was convicted on seventeen counts of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy and given the maximum sentence of ten years by Judge Lance Ito. At the time, Ito is said to have remarked, “More people have suffered from the point of a fountain pen than from a gun.”

When Keating returned to the table, he noticed my sour looks (I don’t much cotton to strangers, especially when they’re drunk ratbags) and invited me over to his table. I politely refused and finished up my meal to return to my room and read Viking sagas about even more thoroughgoing ratbags.

The Foss Hotel Skaftafell

The Foss Hotel Skaftafell

The next morning, as I was hiking to the national park headquarters, I saw the Keating party leave in a small chartered tour bus and sighed with relief. I knew two people who had invested in his S&L and nothing good to say for or to the man. It was rather pitiful that he found it necessary to travel with a bunch of yes-men who had nothing particularly good to say about him while he was out of earshot.

So it goes.

 

 

 

 

 

As Likely As Any Other Theory

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A Painting of Neptune by an Indian Artist

A Painting of Neptune by an Indian Artist

Since most of the news about Malaysian Flight 370—or just about anything else—is so preposterous of late, I have decided to float some of my own theories. My theory is that Neptune (a.k.a. Poseidon), the Roman God of the Sea has hijacked Flight 370 and taken the Boeing down to his undersea palace a thousand miles west of Perth, Australia, where the passengers will be fêted on tea and cakes until he allows them to take off again.

As for Vladimir Putin’s recent takeover of Crimea, it is my firm belief that my friend Bill Korn has it right on his blog. Mr. Putin is trying to put together a new Greater Teabagistan now that the old Soviet Empire has run out of steam. And who better to rule as the new Czar of Teabagistan than Putin himself. I understand he is even thinking of taking Transdniester away from the Republic of Moldova because he feels they are not pronouncing it right. (Our Vladi is a stickler for correct pronunciation.)

In the United States, with the McCutcheon vs. FEH (not FEC as reported) decision, the U.S. Supreme Court is on the point of granting full freedom of speech and all other First Amendment rights to corporations, and then embarking upon the next step: Declaring human beings to be a carbon unit infestation that has arrogated too many rights to itself.

The real reason for David Letterman’s upcoming retirement from CBS is that he wants to become the new Stephen Colbert, while Colbert takes over his helm at CBS. Talk about a Chinese fire drill!

Perhaps I should apply to the news stations to come up with theories for their breaking news stories. If anyone can break the news, look no further than yours truly.

By the way, the above illustration of Neptune is by Indian artist Shakti Prasad Srichandan.