Friday BookReview: The many ways we trip over Africa

[first published October 24, 2014]



               

“I prefer clarity over agreement.”  (Dennis Prager) 

One of the best smackdowns to appear in the 'New York Times' in recent years was when travel writer Paul Theroux took on Irish musician Bono.

                                     

The opening line, plus a few others:

"There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment." 

"I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors... Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly." 

"Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane."

What happens when an American newspaper sends a black reporter to cover Africa, and it turns out his allegiance to political correctness is negligible? A fine book results: Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa.


Author Keith Richburg, a native of Detroit, says:

"I'm tired of lying. And I'm tired of all the ignorance and hypocrisy and the double standards I hear and read about Africa, much of it from people who've never been there, let alone spent three years walking around amid the corpses... Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African 'brothers' and I'll throw it back in your face... Thank God that I am an American [and] thank God my ancestor survived [the] voyage [to America on the slave ship]..."

Some excerpts from a review by Arch Puddington (1997):

[I]t is his observations on the pathology of African politics, and how that pathology intersects with our own racial perplexities, which ultimately make Out of America not only a provocative but an important book. Richburg has a powerful and very American sense of right and wrong, and he is especially sensitive to the cynical and manipulative use of the racial trump card in relations between Africans and Americans. The brazen exploitation of racial guilt by the thieves and murderers who are the continent’s despots especially appalled him... 

Richburg was present at a 1993 conference in Gabon attended by leading black American civil-rights activists. Among the guests of honor, he reports, was the continent’s youngest dictator, Valentine Strasser of Sierre Leone, a twenty-eight-year-old soldier who had seized power through a coup and proceeded systematically to arrest and execute officials of the previous regime. When Strasser strode into the hall, garbed in the standard-issue outfit of African strongmen—a camouflage uniform and Ray Ban sunglasses—the Americans erupted into cheering and frenzied applause...  

From Douglas Wilder, the first black governor of a Southern state, came the observation that “We cannot and should not expect [African governments] to undergo a metamorphosis in seconds . . . our job is not to interfere.” Benjamin Chavis (now Chavis Muhammad), then-director of the NAACP, warned against attempting “to superimpose a Western standard of democracy.” And Jesse Jackson heaped accolades on the ruthless Nigerian dictator Ibrahim Babangida, calling him “one of the great leader-servants of the modern world in our time.”

Jesse Jackson in Ivory Coast

Defending Pope Francis: Amoris laetitia debate Dr. Pence and Fr. Echert at AOTM

Certainly one of the most vibrant men's groups in Minnesota is the Argument of the Month Club. It is based at St. Augustine parish in South St. Paul, under the guidance of Father John Echert.

Recently, David Pence engaged Father in a rousing debate over the contents of Amoris laetitia -- the Pope's lengthy reflections regarding the Synods on the Family, held in 2014 and 2015.

Fr. Echert is not a fan of the document, but Doc Pence gave him a stream of reasons not to be too dismissive. Browse some of the video; it's entertaining as well as illuminating.

                 

The Holy Father with some of the African cardinals at the Synod

UPDATE: This book review by Pence, from last year, lays out some of the ways that Francis is such a unique occupant of the Chair of St. Peter.

Map on Monday: TURKEY

[first published on July 13, 2015]



Stratfor - short for Strategic Forecasting, Inc. - is a private global intelligence company that offers geopolitical insight into the interplay of nations. Stratfor has developed an excellent series of short (~2-4 minute) videos which provide the viewer with a specific nation, along with its basic history, geography, culture, and geopolitical allies and adversaries. In the following video, they present the geographic challenges facing Turkey.

Turkey: A non-Arab Sunni state resacralizing and reorienting towards the Islamic world 

by A. Joseph Lynch

Turkey has 80 million people and is the eighth largest military in the world-the largest (rated by Global Firepower) in the Mideast. It  is geostrategically situated at the crossroads of three civilizations: Orthodox Russia, the Islamic Middle East, and the atheist-superstate (and successor to the Soviet Union) that is the European Union. With one foot in Europe and another in Asia, Turkey controls the important waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Aegean. Occupying what has been called 'Asia Minor,' Turkey was once part of the ancient Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires before comprising the heartland of the Christian Byzantine Empire and thereafter the Muslim Ottoman-Turkic Empires. With its empire dissolved following World War I, the modern state of Turkey was forged by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk whose secularizing principles sought to incorporate Turkey into modern European society and away from its historically Islamic past. Turkey became a member of NATO in 1952 and today has the second largest standing military in NATO after the United States (all males are required to serve and conscientious objection is not accepted). Turkey has also long sought entrance into the European Union, but despite its efforts to mimic the atheist West, Turkey is still seen as an outsider and its entry has never been approved.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as Turkey's current President has spearheaded a movement to return to Turkey's Muslim roots and reorient itself towards the Islamic world. Here, however, Turkey is also somewhat of an outsider. Despite its Sunni Muslim faith, the vast amount of Turkey's population is ethnically Turkic rather than Arab. Turkey is thus not a member of the Arab League; nor, due to geography, the Gulf States. Egypt and Turkey are regional rivals and Turkey's Sunni faith puts it at odds with Shia Iran, Syria, and Yemen. Turkey also has centuries of bad relations and wars with Orthodox Russia to the north and its allies in the Caucasus (particularly Armenia). Turkey itself is comprised of around 20% Kurds, who have expressed a deep desire for autonomy. This has led to Turkey often turning a blind eye in regards to ISIS and even expressing worries over recent Iraqi-Kurdish gains against ISIS along Turkey's border with Syria.A key educational and cultural movement in Turkey is an Islamic global network called the Gulen. Understanding them and their relation to the present government is a key communal loyalty to decipher. The link is to their web page. There are many other perspectives on their role.  Here  was a good piece of reporting from 2010.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, July 16

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

MEN, RACIAL VIOLENCE, AND THE AMERICAN NATION: Is there a lesson from St Benedict? by Dr. Pence on the saint’s feast day.  Avoiding 1968 by Dreher.  Clear talk from Giuliani. Police and black shootings by the numbers. Using a robot to blow up the shooter.

ON DALLAS -- SOCIALIZING MICAH: Profile highlighting his military experience.

He went in a Christian and a patriot with no racial hatred. His mother’s take that he came out a hermit looking for a different cause than protecting his country.

We have seen this very bad deal of trading Christian American brotherhood for the thin gruel of black power. It was the beginning of the betrayal of the civil rights movement. The civic element was lost and racial identity came to the fore with disastrous effects.

His military experience became a sad saga of jilted love and humiliation instead of brotherhood. This missed socialization is not just a loss for black men but young white men as well. From an excellent review of 'Hillbilly Elegy'.

"For most boys, however, becoming a man is The Big Journey. And their needs are being forgotten today—with the result that many, not just Vance, are scrabbling. My three decades at the U.S. Naval Academy, which is part of the world of privilege Vance manages to join, have shown me that most midshipmen also arrive chasing a vision of masculinity that the Naval Academy quickly kills, leaving them burnt out and rootless at an early age.
"The military is a structured existence that still relies on its PR image of macho striving to attract volunteer recruits. That includes the upper echelons, like midshipmen. These young men, and also many of the women, like Vance, also (in my experience) long for the relentless drill instructor, the challenge to overcome insecurities, the sense of pride in challenges surmounted. What they find is an institution obsessed with a million pointless regulations that puts on parades for tourists, where physical challenges have been watered down to take account of our new gender neutrality, and where the politically correct embrace of any gender -- and sexual orientation-self identification has caused the men to wonder what happened to the macho. Most are bitterly disappointed to find themselves also-ran cast members in a taxpayer-funded military Disneyland for tourists. They came thinking it would be their Parris Island, and it isn’t. Where’s their role model?"

While the military may be losing its core message, Black hate groups are staying on point and Micah Xavier got the message.

    

THE USE OF DISGUST: Smell is a primitive instinct that protects us from certain poisons. A sense of moral disgust, like a sense of shame, is a primitive and necessary shield in responding to certain evils. Anthony Esolen is certainly one of America’s greatest contemporary Catholic writers.

BREXIT AND IMMIGRATION: "It is impossible truly to understand the Brexit vote without first understanding the significance of the changes wrought by immigration in the UK over the last few decades. The speed and scale of the demographic transformation that immigration has brought to Britain is truly remarkable. Each year, Britain takes in more immigrants than it did in the entire period between 1066 and 1950."

PAT BUCHANAN AND HIS ILL-FATED DEFENSE OF THE ETHNIC WEST: "Is it over for the West?" asks Pat Buchanan. President Obama decries nativism and nationalism and the Brexit vote. But, then, Pat Buchanan agrees it is all about defending the shrinking fates of white people. Buchanan has no sense of the burgeoning Christian southern populations and doesn’t seem to see their rise as proof of the resiliency of Christianity. He seems not to see the importance that most of America’s immigrants are Christian. He seems not to see that Christianity is growing faster than Islam worldwide. There are so many times that Buchanan writes when he seems the only voice of sanity. But on ethnicity vs. religion as the heart of culture he is persistently wrongheaded. When he defends the Anglo-white races does he not know that none of those Anglo defenders thought of the Irish as part of the advanced white race? Not at all! It was only Christianity and the peculiar American nationalism of brotherhood that allowed his forefathers into the club. He needs to learn something from those other great American Catholic Irish tribesmen -- John and Robert Kennedy.

A NEW SPOKESMAN AT THE VATICAN: American layman and Opus Dei.

CHINA AND US IN SOUTH CHINA SEA: A way to get along.

SAUDIS AND THE 28 PAGES
The pages have been released.
Why the Saudis are our enemies, and have been for decades.

TURKEY: ERDOGAN AND GULEN
One take on the Gulen movement which President Erdogan blames for the July 15th coup attempt.

Friday BookReview: MOBY DICK -- America's majestic novel

"To the Sea, to the Sea! The white gulls are crying,

 The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying..."

    (the elf Legolas in Lord of the Rings)

Here is the 30th chapter of Herman Melville's story -- a single page entitled 'The Pipe':

When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp, and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. 

In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhal [a large fish with a unicorn-like, long sharp twisted tusk sticking out of his head]. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolised? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.

Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How now," he soliloquised at last, withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no longer soothes. Oh my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here I have been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, -- aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more." 

He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.

"Reality outran apprehensions; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck."

Take a look at this short video of Nathaniel Philbrick's overview of the novel.

Queequeg, son of a cannibal chieftain

Some excerpts from a review by Chris Riddell:

I had known about Moby Dick for a long time, but until last year I never attempted reading it. The reason I picked it up was because an editor friend recommended it to me along with a list of other classic literature...

Moby Dick begins with one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature: “Call me Ishmael.” He is the story’s narrator throughout the Pequod’s three year voyage on the seas led by the monomaniac Captain Ahab. As a lowly deckhand, he does not often take action but mostly is a passive observer in much the way that a journalist would report a news story. He is on the side lines watching and telling us the story. In many ways, he is the perfect narrator. At times digressive, insightful, and vulgar he takes us inside the whaler’s world.

It is dense, and long, but also transcendent. Moby Dick is one of those books that every aspiring author should read. Herman Melville created a work so timeless that people today can still learn a lot about the craft of writing from it. Every line is like poetry. Take this passage for example explaining how Ahab lost his leg, and why he so fervently hates the whale.

"And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, nor no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations."

The book is filled with writing like this. But one of the frustrating things for many people who try to read Moby Dick is in how Melville focuses on very specific aspects of the whaling industry and describes them to extreme detail and length...

There are many times when his style works very well. For example, there is one entire chapter called 'The Whiteness of the Whale,' which is over 3000 words and only talks about the color white with an inexhaustible compendium of metaphors and similes. You can’t help but wonder where he comes up with this stuff.

"This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?"

All throughout Moby Dick, Melville demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of whales and the whaling industry. At times it’s hard to figure out what the hell he’s taking about because of all the technical terminology. Thankfully there are footnotes and endnotes... Not only is Moby Dick a novel, but it also doubles as a textbook on the practice of whaling. Entire chapters are devoted to things like the whale’s teeth, or the valuable oil the crew extracts from their bodies.

At its core, Moby Dick is about obsession and self-destruction. Ahab’s quest to find the whale sends them all over the world and he will stop at nothing until he drives his spear deep into the whale’s heart. Hence the famous line in the final chapter: "From hell’s heart I stab at thee. For hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee." Ahab puts aside the safety of his own crew, and even his own mortality in pursuit of vengeance. In the end, one cannot take revenge on an animal and we see Ahab’s final doom in the futility of it all.

Moby Dick suffers from being one of those books that is studied rather than enjoyed, but there is tremendous value in here for anyone...The enjoyment of this book lies in Melville’s elegant prose, and the beauty contained in each passage. I put it down with a great feeling of achievement, as if I had come home from a long journey...

_____________________

                                                       

One of my favorite characters is Father Mapple, pastor of the Whaleman's Chapel in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

"He had been a sailor and a harpooner in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry." He ascended to the pulpit via a perpendicular side ladder, "as if ascending the main-top of his vessel." Then, he would "deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec... Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow."

Father Mapple leafed through his Bible, and proceeded to deliver a sermon on Jonah:

"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters -- four yarns -- is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sea-line sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly!" 

He reminds his flock that "all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do... and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists." 

"Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah... [After the whale vomited him out on dry land] the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten -- his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean -- Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!" 

"Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!... Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!" 

"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?"

Moby Dick continues with Ishmael setting out for the island where so many whaling vogages commenced. Accompanied by his new best friend, the South Sea harpooner Queequeg, they board a packet schooner in New Bedford, and "... after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket. Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore... Look at it -- a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights [a living being] will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally... that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome... that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie... "

"Praise Him, you that sail the sea;

 praise Him, all creatures of the sea!"

                    (Isaiah 42)