Peter Krupa

And while we’re on the New Yorker, this week George Packer has an enormous article about the bureaucratic fuck-up that is the U.S. occupation of of Iraq. It defies glib summary, so you should probably just read the whole thing. That guy on the right is an Iraqi interpreter in the employ of the U.S. As you can see, he’s taken pains to conceal his identity. That’s because interpreters are being murdered now, willy-nilly, a fact to which the State Department has been slow to catch on. Visas for Iraqis? Why? Everything is going great!

(I’m actually starting to become ashamed of my country.)

From the New Yorker:

—Did you hear the news, Mr. President? The students at the University of Pittsfield are walking out of their classes, in protest over the war.

—(spits out coffee) Wha— What did you say?

—Apparently, students are standing up in the middle of lectures and walking right out of the building.

—But students love lectures. If they’re willing to give those up, they must really be serious about this peace thing! How did you hear about this protest?

—The White House hears about every protest, no matter how small.

—Oh, right, I remember.

—You haven’t heard the half of it, Mr. President. The leader of the group says that if you don’t stop the war today they’re going to . . . to . . . I’m sorry, I can’t say it out loud. It’s just too terrifying.

—Say it, damn it! I’m the President!

—All right! If you don’t stop the war . . . they’re going to stop going to school for the remainder of the week.

—Send the troops home.

—But, Mr. President! Shouldn’t we talk about this?

—Send the troops home.

They say there are 14,000 different uses for salt. Mark Kurlansky, author of the excellent  book Salt, chronicles two of the more peculiar ones:

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prison. They too would be salted and put on trial.

And now one from China:

In China, the more obscure the ingredients and the more arcane the method, the more status the dish has. “Soaked frog” was a specialty for Zigong salt merchants. A few pieces of wood would be floated in a large jar of brine. Live frogs would be put in the jar and they would desperately perch on the pieces of wood. The jar was closed and sealed. After six months, the jar would be opened and the frogs would be dead and dried on the wood but preserved because they had dipped in the salt. They would then be steamed.

Have a nice Sunday.

I like to ridicule the New York Times‘ earnest, patronizing coverage of immigration. At root, it’s always meant to cause pity, which is not a very humanizing emotion. Immigrants, in the Times‘ world, are victims. It’s especially frustrating because immigration to a foreign land is not pitiful. It is courageous, dangerous, and bold, which should theoretically make for some incredible stories of people with the kind of can-do, entreprenurial attitudes that make America great.

In that respect, the Times could learn something from Letras Libres, a Mexican/Spanish magazine that this month has an amazing story about a typical Mexican immigrant named Benavides Huaroco. It’s a story that breaks all the narrative cliches of typical immigration coverage in the English media. There are no victims here, just characters you can empathize with and root for.

In a nutshell, Benavides Huaroco is a subsistence farmer in Cheran. He sees his friends coming back from America, all elegant, speaking English, wearing new Converse, and he decides - you know what? - he’s going to get himself a pair of new shoes.

He has adventures. He gets chased by the Mexican authorities, gets screwed by his first employer, and returns back home empty-handed. He swears to never return, but his friend talks him into it, and they go back to work on a farm in Alabama. There are kind gringo employers that give him a hand. One of those gringos comments for the article:

“People like this are what make this country work… You want to make a lot of money? Then find some way to bring more families like that here, but legally. Businesses here need that labor, and if you can find a way to bring them here without problems, you’re gonna make very good money. The only thing they want is to feed their families with dignity. They’re good people, and hard workers.”

There’s nothing candy coated about the story. One time Mr. Huaroco got his drivers license suspended after he got caught drunk driving. Another time he has a racially-charged run-in with his African-American manager. It’s tough for Mr. Huaroco. But you know what? You don’t pity him. You cheer him on. You want him to succeed.

And in the end, when he’s making a healthy living selling Mexican music and sundry paraphernalia in his shop outside Foley, Alabama, and when he’s brought almost his entire family to live and work in the States, and when he’s still living in a mobile home because he wistfully keeps one foot in his homeland, you don’t feel sorry for him, because you know that from being a poor subsistence farmer in the back country of Mexico who just wanted a new pair of Converse, Mr. Huaroco has done pretty damn good for himself.

Why can’t the English media manage to find stories like this? Is it too cheesy? Not ironic/existential/desperate enough, the way immigrants are supposed to be? We’re all post-American Dream, right? Jaded in our upper-middle class malaise. Well, there’s got to be some reason 11 million people have entered this country illegally in the last two decades.

And I don’t think it was to become victims.

A columnist in the LA Times today spends about 800 words carfully not saying that blacks don’t like latinos moving into their neighborhoods. It’s a remarkable little dance:

I know, I know: To feel other than welcoming to new arrivals is to be racist, xenophobic or, at the very least, neurotic about change. I adamantly reject the first two but reluctantly claim the third.

Whew! Glad she’s denied being racist and xenophobic. Now we can all move on.

I guess I could bitch about double standards in race relations, but that’s not the point. The point is, racism between blacks and latinos seems to be kind of an issue, yet everyone is terrified of talking about it.

Even if this column is a little cutesy, it’s at least a start.

Haven’t I already seen this movie at least twice? And isn’t figure skating just too… easy? It’s like Will Farrell is parodying a Will Farrell movie.

AP headline: Castro to be ‘ready’ for election

I think they put the scare-quotes around the wrong word. Anyway, it’s a good thing we have the AP around to keep America informed about the political goings on in Cuba:

A lengthy process of nominating candidates for municipal elections will begin this summer, leading to several rounds of voting. Then, by March 2008, Cuba should be ready to hold parliamentary elections that are expected to include Castro, Alarcon said.

The 80-year-old Castro was the world’s longest-ruling head of state, occupying the island’s presidency for 47 years before temporarily stepping aside in favor of his younger brother, Raul, following emergency intestinal surgery in July.

Emphasis mine, of course. Now we understand why, last month when the Cuban government expelled three foreign correspondents, the AP’s wasn’t among them.

OK! So now, not only does the U.S. hold people indefinitely against their will, use sketchy interrogation techniques, deny them the right to appeal their detention, and subject them to closed hearings, but then those people suddenly and miraculously confess to just about everything!

And the Pentagon waves around a transcript - “See! Look! He confessed!” - which is supposed to… what? Give us a warm, fuzzy faith in American justice?

Whatever the truth of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s guilt, procedure in getting to it is crucial, and appearance is everything. Right now, we appear more or less like the Soviet Union.

It’s a strange morning at the New York Times. First, a gun fight in Greenwich Village that started when a man wearing a fake beard walked into a pizza joint and shot the bartender 15 times in the back. He ran out, and was followed by two unarmed, volunteer(?) cops, whom he shot dead. Then, by all accounts, the police had had enough, ran the guy down, and shot him back. He’s dead now.

But let’s turn our attention to South Africa, where in 2005 a business man/swindler named Brett Kebble was murdered with a 9 mm while he sat on the highway. The accused murderer - a mob boss named Glenn “The Landlord” Agliotti - has come up with the most ballsy defense, possibly ever: “He has argued through his lawyers that the killing was really an assisted suicide, arranged by Mr. Kebble days before an audit exposed a billion-rand fraud at one of his companies.”

Anyway, the late Mr. Kebble’s dirty dealings reached much too far into South African politics and everyone’s a-twitter, wondering which heads will roll next. Oh, and it also turns out that “The Landlord” is a close friend of South Africa’s national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, who at this moment also happens to be the president of Interpol. Fantastic.

The only thing I’m left wondering is if the late Mr. Kebble’s long-lost nephews and whatnot have been contacted yet by his banker in Nigeria.

It’s kind of intense watching a defense correspondent for United Press International get all choked up on C-SPAN. She went to Iraq wanting to answer policy issues of American security yadda yadda, and now she’s back with stories of people getting their heads cut off and put on stakes, and children getting shot in the face. It’s a 9-minute video, and it’s totally worth it.