Living Off Rats to Survive in Zimbabwe

My father grew up under Nazi occupation in Greece and remembers villagers being so hungry and desperate that they picked lice out of their hair and ate them in order stay alive.

Jeff Koinange is a prescient journalist--his reports from the African continent are among the finest aired in our country--and he bravely and consistently works to impart attention to the poorest regions of the world. Countries afflicted with "stupid poverty", as Bono calls it.

In his latest piece for CNN, Koinange unveils how citizens of Zimbabwe are eating rats because their food supply has evaporated:

Living Off Rats to Survive in Zimbabwe

By Jeff Koinange
CNN

(CNN) -- Twelve-year-old Beatrice returns from the fields with small animals she's caught for dinner.

Her mother, Elizabeth, prepares the meat and cooks it on a grill made of three stones supporting a wood fire. It's just enough food, she says, to feed her starving family of six.

Tonight, they dine on rats.

"Look what we've been reduced to eating?" she said. "How can my children eat rats in a country that used to export food? This is a tragedy."

This is a story about how Zimbabwe, once dubbed southern Africa's bread basket, has in six short years become a basket case. It is about a country that once exported surplus food now apparently falling apart, with many residents scrounging for rodents to survive.

More:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/12/19/koinange.zimbabwe/index.html

Jeff Koinage's CNN bio:
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/anchors_reporters/koinange.jeff.html

And now, the estimable Mr. Estey:

My friend, Chris Estey, has two crackling pieces out now.

In his Three Imaginary Girls review of the Decemberists' The Crane Wife, he wisely observes:

"Both of these comments are just angles hacks take to avoid spending more time with the music, absorbing the admittedly convoluted but compelling storytelling of bandleader Colin Meloy, in language not all that much more 'literary' than anything on a Bob Dylan or an Elvis Costello album. Okay, so the combination of more obscure words and faintly archaic musical forms may suggest some sort of complicated nostalgic aesthetic on the band's part, but to me it's no less organic than the Pogues. There's just a little less male prostitution and getting kicked in the nards by the cops."


In his Shorthand for Epic profile in the Stranger, he elicits my new favorite music-related quote:

"Beau, my roommate, who took the picture, and brought Larry into the band, is against that idea of four rogues smoking, leaning up against the wall of the building. You know what? You're not a street gang. Unless you're scary motherfuckers like Suicidal Tendencies, stop looking like it! And you're not fashion models. You're playing music."


Bravo, Chris!

Keep readin':

http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com/decemberists06nov.asp

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=118747

"Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball."

Jeff Stein's Congressional Quarterly piece on U.S. governmental and systemic ignorance of Sunni and Shiite beliefs and alliances is journalism at its most useful:

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – SpyTalk
Dec. 8, 2006 – 7:43 p.m.

Democrats’ New Intelligence Chairman Needs a Crash Course on al Qaeda

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Forty years ago, Sgt. Silvestre Reyes was a helicopter crew chief flying dangerous combat missions in South Vietnam from the top of a soaring rocky outcrop near the sea called Marble Mountain.

After the war, it turned out that the communist Viet Cong had tunneled into the hill and built a combat hospital right beneath the skids of Reyes’ UH-1 Huey gunship.

Now the five-term Texas Democrat, 62, is facing similar unpleasant surprises about the enemy, this time as the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

That’s because, like a number of his colleagues and top counterterrorism officials that I’ve interviewed over the past several months, Reyes can’t answer some fundamental questions about the powerful forces arrayed against us in the Middle East.

It begs the question, of course: How can the Intelligence Committee do effective oversight of U.S. spy agencies when its leaders don’t know basics about the battlefield?

To his credit, Reyes, a kindly, thoughtful man who also sits on the Armed Service Committee, does see the undertows drawing the region into chaos.

For example, he knows that the 1,400- year-old split in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites not only fuels the militias and death squads in Iraq, it drives the competition for supremacy across the Middle East between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia.

That’s more than two key Republicans on the Intelligence Committee knew when I interviewed them last summer. Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., and Terry Everett, R-Ala., both back for another term, were flummoxed by such basic questions, as were several top counterterrorism officials at the FBI.

I thought it only right now to pose the same questions to a Democrat, especially one who will take charge of the Intelligence panel come January. The former border patrol agent also sits on the Armed Services Committee.

Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.

We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism’s major players.

To me, it’s like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who’s on what side?

The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up a l Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center.

Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?

Civil War

And Hezbollah? I asked him. What are they?

“Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah...”

He laughed again, shifting in his seat.

“Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?”

“Poquito,” I said—a little.

“Poquito?! “ He laughed again.

“Go ahead,” I said, talk to me about Sunnis and Shia in Spanish.

Reyes: “Well, I, uh....”

I apologized for putting him “on the spot a little.” But I reminded him that the people who have killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil and in the Middle East have been front page news for a long time now.

It’s been 23 years since a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed over 200 U.S. military personnel in Beirut, mostly Marines.

Hezbollah, a creature of Iran, is close to taking over in Lebanon. Reports say they are helping train Iraqi Shiites to kill Sunnis in the spiralling civil war.

“Yeah,” Reyes said, rightly observing, “but . . . it’s not like the Hatfields and the McCoys. It’s a heck of a lot more complex.

“And I agree with you — we ought to expend some effort into understanding them. But speaking only for myself, it’s hard to keep things in perspective and in the categories.”

Reyes is not alone.

The best argument for needing to understand who’s what in the Middle East is probably the mistaken invasion itself, despite the preponderance of expert opinion that it was a terrible idea — including that of Bush’s father and his advisers. On the day in 2003 when Iraqi mobs toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Bush was said to be unaware of the possibility that a Sunni-Shia civil war could fill the power vacuum, according to a reliable source with good White House connections.

If President Bush and some of his closest associates, not to mention top counterterrorism officials, have demonstrated their own ignorance about who the players are in the Middle East, why should we expect the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee to get it right?

Trent Lott, the veteran Republican senator from Mississippi, said only last September that “It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people.”

“Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion?” wondered Lott, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after a meeting with Bush.

“Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference?

“They all look the same to me,” Lott said.

Haunting

The administration’s disinterest in the Arab world has rattled down the chain of command.

Only six people in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad are fluent in Arabic, according to last week’s report of the Iraq Study Group. Only about two dozen of the embassy’s thousand employees have some familiarity with the language, the report said.

The Iraq Study Group was amazed to find that, despite spending $2 billion on Iraq in 2006, more wasn’t being done to try “to understand the people who fabricate, plant and explode roadside bombs.”

Rare is the military unit with an American soldier who can read a captured document or interrogate a prisoner, my own sources tell me.

It was that way in Vietnam, too, Reyes says, which “haunts us.”

“If you substitute Arabization for Vietnamization, if you substitute . . . our guys going in and taking over a place then leaving it and the bad guys come back in. . . .”

He trails off, despairing.

“I could draw many more analogies.”

Yet Reyes says he favors sending more troops there.

“If it’s going to target the militias and eliminate them, I think that’s a worthwhile investment,” he said.

It’s hard to find anybody in Iraq who thinks the U.S. can do that.

On “a temporary basis, I’m willing to ramp them up by twenty or thirty thousand . . . for, I don’t know, two months, four months, six months — but certainly that would be an exception,” Reyes said.

Meanwhile, the killing is going on below decks, too, within Sunni and Shiite groups and factions.

Anybody who pays serious attention to Iraq knows that.

Reyes says his first hearings come January will focus on how U.S. intelligence can do a better job helping the troops in Iraq.

It may be way too late for that.

“Stop giving me tests!” Reyes exclaimed, half kidding.

“I’m not going to talk to you any more!”

Next: More on intelligence topics from my interview with Rep. Reyes.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Link:

http://public.cq.com/public/20061211_homeland.html

As my dad calls them, "those fellows in the Cab you wrote about"

Two of my guy friends once challenged themselves to come up with one thousand synonyms for "penis" during the course of a forty-eight hour road trip. (Both of them had recently become engaged to their longtime girlfriends. When I asked if they'd interrupted the cock talk to discuss said relationships, they totally cracked up.)

Anyway, last night's DCfC show at the Key Arena blazed so fucking brilliantly, that if I were so inclined, I could concoct one thousand synonyms for "awesome" and it would still be insufficient. And I saw it with C and T, two of my closest friends for the past twenty years. I'm holiday-neutral, but last night felt like a celebration.

Power to the people and all that

Ballots for sundry year-end music polls are out now. Unless maggots have crunched through your skull, you can guess my top two picks. And it's worth reminding everyone, especially the children, that R.E.M.'s And I Feel Fine: The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987 warrants accolades.

Three Imaginary Girls:

http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com/VOTE/

KEXP:

http://www.kexp.org/programming/charts/top90.asp

Stereogum:

http://www.stereogum.com/2006_gummy_awards.php

Tales, booze, yam fries

The Seattle Art Museum is hosting a series of smaller events around town to build momentum for the opening of their Olympic Sculpture Park next month. Tonight they're teaming with the story-telling salon, A Guide to Visitors, for a "Best of 2006" night at the Rendezvous. I've been asked to tell the story of a friend who was exposed as a literary hoax. The show starts at 7:30 and I'm on second.

The Seattle Times AGTV piece from a few years back by the lovely Brangien Davis:
http://tinyurl.com/uwjpe

"If I could open my arms/ and span the length of the island Manhattan..."

I have two extra tickets to Death Cab's December 9 Seattle show at the Key Arena. I'm going with my friend, C, but the rest of our horde has a scheduling conflict.

Tickets are:

Section 113, row 26, face value. (These aren't comps.)

Email me at ldremousis@yahoo.com if you're interested. (And if you're not, you should have that looked at: perhaps it's glandular.)

Okay, I have some corduroys to press.

Litsa

"Let's see how well they perform their trademark brand of hyper-literate prog rock when I'm slicing off their legs at the knee!"--Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert takes on the Decemberists:

http://www.stereogum.com/archives/004055.html

Because everything I write eventually gets linked to porn

My essay, "The Great Cookie Offering", appears in the upcoming Seal Press anthology, Single State of the Union, alongside work from compadre Michelle Goodman and the unfettered Margaret Cho.

You can pre-order it on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1580052029/ref=pd_rvi_gw_1/102-9493496-4968963

Or check out the full line-up on Rachel Kramer Bussel's delightfully smutty blog, The Lusty Lady:

http://lustylady.blogspot.com/2006/11/single-state-of-union-anthology.html

Mad props to editor Diane Mapes for galvanizing us all.

Bunnies: now more than ever

Logically and morally, I'm in a specious position--I ate a turkey sandwich for lunch--and I know cultures are somewhat arbitrary in choosing which animals to protect or to kill, but I would be pleased if rabbits were more widely viewed as companion animals. I'm glad the European Union is proposing a ban on the sale of dog and cat fur, but rabbits should be added to the list. (Yes, I know I've written about bunnies and rainbows today. Email me if you'd like to hear about the Capitol Records publicist who should be tazed.)

From the Associated Press via MSNBC:

EU proposes ban on sale of cat, dog fur
New law would extend to 25 nations in bloc; fur found in clothing, kids toys

Updated: 8:50 a.m. PT Nov 20, 2006

(AP) BRUSSELS, Belgium - The European Union’s executive commission proposed Monday to extend a ban on the sale, import and production of dog and cat fur to all 25 EU nations, saying the measure was taken a response to an overwhelming public outcry.

The European Commission said it found cat and dog fur in some clothing, personal accessories and soft toys for children being sold on the European market, either falsely labeled as another kind of fur, or hidden within the product.

“Just the idea of young children playing with toys which have been made with dog and cat fur is really something we cannot accept,” said Markos Kyprianou, the commission’s consumer protection commissioner. “In Europe, as you know, cats and dogs are considered companion animals and nothing else.”

Kyprianou said Europeans were shocked by “images of cats and dogs being kept in cages and slaughtered in cruel and shocking conditions for their fur.” He noted that 15 EU member states already have bans in place, but that an EU-wide ban — which he expected to be approved quickly — serves to bring clear guidelines for all member nations.

'People are disgusted'

Because of the fur trade’s secretive nature, he said, it was hard to estimate how much dog and cat fur finds its way onto the market or pinpoint its source.

However, a December 2005 investigation by the Australian animal-rights group Humane Society International showed dog and cat fur production had taken place in the Czech Republic and other Eastern European states.

“People are disgusted when they find out that cats and dogs are killed every year for their fur,” said HSI Director Mark Glover.

HSI estimates around 2 million cats and dogs are killed for fur each year, with an estimated 5,400 cats and dogs killed in China each day.

© 2006 The Associated Press.

Link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15816158/GT1=8717

The imagery has been bastardized...

...and the symbolism is obvious, but there's a rainbow outside my window and I'm smiling: it's impossible to ignore a Popsicle-striped sky.

From CNN via the Associated Press: Abortion foe to head family-planning office

Link:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/17/family.planning.ap/index.html

NARAL:

http://www.naral.org/

Planned Parenthood:

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

"And under the boughs unbowed/ All clothed in a snowy shroud..."

My Decemberists feature for the Seattle Weekly is here and my world is tasty as milkshakes:

http://seattleweekly.com/music/0646/decemberists.php

One of our sister publications, The Cleveland Scene, ran it, too. Please note it bears little resemblance to the Seattle Weekly version, i.e. the version I actually wrote:

http://www.clevescene.com/Issues/2006-11-08/music/music4.html

My Seattle Weekly editor, Brian Barr, is a Believer compadre and if you haven't already, you should partake in his interview with the author, Padgett Powell:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=interview_powell

See you at the Paramount Friday night!

For those scoring at home

1) In the past few weeks, I've been asked to write for two of my favorite publications and had a short story accepted to a lit journal I admire.

2) One of my editors has tucked his dick so far between his legs, it is now wedged up his own ass.

3) I interviewed singer/songwriter/pianist Annie Stela for Filter this morning and she was as engaging as her songs:

http://www.anniestela.com/

4) Way up his ass.

5) More so than anything, I feel grateful that I get to do what I love.

Ed Bradley 1941-2006

This makes me inexorably sad. Good night and god bless, Mr. Bradley. From today's New York Times:

Ed Bradley, Veteran CBS Newsman, Dies

By JACQUES STEINBERG

Published: November 9, 2006

Ed Bradley, a pioneering black journalist who was a fixture in American living rooms on Sunday nights for more than a quarter century on “60 Minutes,” died today. He was 65.

Mr. Bradley died at Mt. Sinai Medical Center of complications from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, said Dr. Valentin Fuster, his cardiologist and the director of the Cardiovascular Institute at Mt. Sinai. Mr. Bradley, who underwent a quintuple bypass operation on his heart in 2003, was diagnosed with leukemia "many years ago,” Dr. Fuster said, but it had not posed a threat to his life until recently, when he contracted an infection.

His most recent segments on “60 Minutes” had been on Oct. 15 (on the rape case involving Duke University lacrosse players) and on Oct. 29 (an investigation of an oil refinery explosion in Texas). Even many close colleagues had not known that his health had been deteriorating precipitously for several weeks. On the day that last segment was broadcast, he was admitted to Mt. Sinai. He remained there until his death. “This has been a long battle which he fought silently and courageously,” said Charlayne Hunter-Gault of the “News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” who was one of several close friends at Mr. Bradley’s side when he died this morning. “He didn’t want people to know that this was a part of his struggle. He didn’t want people feeling sorry for him. And for a good part of his life, he managed it.”

To generations of television viewers, Mr. Bradley was a sober presence — albeit one who occasionally wore a stud in one ear — whose reporting across four decades ranged from the Vietnam War and Cambodian refugee crisis to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and the Oklahoma City bombing (his was the only television interview with Timothy McVeigh). He won 19 Emmy awards, including one for “lifetime achievement” in 2003.

But Mr. Bradley’s life off camera was often as rich and compelling as the one in the studio. Having begun his broadcast career as a disc jockey in Philadelphia, Mr. Bradley was an enormous fan of many forms of music — particularly jazz and gospel — who counted the musicians Wynton Marsalis, George Wien and Aaron Neville among his many friends and made a regular pilgrimage to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

“I made the mistake once of letting him get onstage with my band, and he never stopped doing it,” the singer Jimmy Buffett, a friend of Mr. Bradley’s for 30 years who was also with him when he died, said in a telephone interview today. Mr. Bradley had many nicknames throughout his life — including “Big Daddy,” when he played football in the 1960’s at Cheyney State College in Pennsylvania — but his favorite, according to Ms. Hunter-Gault and Mr. Buffett, was “Teddy Badly,” which Mr. Buffett bestowed on him on stage the first time Mr. Bradley played tambourine at his side.

“Everybody in my opinion needs a little Mardi Gras in their life,” Mr. Buffett said, “and he liked to have a little more than the average person on occasion.”

“He was such a great journalist,” Mr. Buffett added, “but he still knew how to have a good time.”

Mr. Bradley, who grew up in Philadelphia, broke into broadcasting as a news reporter for WDAS-FM radio in his hometown. Following that job, he was hired in 1967 as a reporter for WCBS radio in New York.

In 1971, he joined CBS News as a stringer in its Paris bureau and then a year later was transferred to the Saigon bureau. He became a CBS News correspondent in April 1973 and, shortly thereafter, was wounded while on assignment in Cambodia. Mr. Bradley joined 60 Minutes during the 1981-82 season. Among the Emmys he won throughout his career was one for a report on the reopening of the 50-year-old racial murder case of Emmett Till.

Last fall, the National Association of Black Journalists honored Mr. Bradley, who was among the first wave of African Americans to break into network television news, with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

“I grew up in Philadelphia rather protected from life in the South,” Mr. Bradley said at the association’s awards ceremony in Washington. “Emmitt Till and I were the same age when he was killed, and that was my introduction to the reality of life in this country for a black person in the mid 50’s. When we were awarded an Emmy earlier this year for this story, I said it was the most important Emmy I had ever received. I would say the same thing about your recognition tonight.”

Mr. Bradley is survived by his wife, Patricia Blanchet.

Maria Newman contributed reporting.

Link:

http://tinyurl.com/ycujtl

Despite the Northface parkas

I've been working at the Zeitgeist off Pioneer Square for the past two hours. Earlier in the day, I attended a Viva Voce show at the Gibson Showroom down the block--ScreenPlay was filming it, hence the unusual hour--and the band cracked skulls and bricks. Sundry friends, editors, and combinations thereof partook, also, and it was a cheered and raucous gathering.

Now Zeitgeist is piping the "Until the End of the World" soundtrack.

Sometimes this city gets it just right.

Dear Howard Dean,

I voted mostly for the DNC ticket. Now could you please stay off the airwaves until all of us are dead?

Thank you for your consideration in this matter.

Sincerely,

Litsa Dremousis

Re the election, I think it's wise not to get cocky:

This was a vote against the Republicans as much as it was a vote for the Democrats. And the Democrats have yet to elucidate a new policy for Iraq. Still, I'm pleased that the D's have gained majority in the House for the first time in twelve years, that they might regain the Senate, that Maria Cantwell handily won her second term, and, of course, that Donald Rumsfeld has resigned.

Re the fact Nancy Pelosi will probably be the first female Speaker of the House and third in line to the the presidency, I cede the floor to Chris Rock:

"As long as you live you will never see a black vice president, you know why? Because some black guy would just kill the president. I'd do it. If Colin Powell was vice president, I'd kill the president and tell his mother about it. What would happen to me? What would they do? Put me in jail with a bunch of black guys that would treat me like a king for the rest of my life? I would be the biggest star in jail, alright, people would be coming up to me and I'd be signing autographs: '97-KY, here you go.' Guys would be going: 'You're the brother that shot Bush. And you told his mother about it huh? I hope my children turn out to be just like you. Man, you know I was getting ready to rape you until I realized who you were.' And even if they had a death penalty, what would happen? I'd just be pardoned by the black president."

[Note: it's an old quote. He's actually discussing #41, not #43. The more things change, etc.]

The Centers for Disease Control announces that CFIDS (aka Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) is real

I've had a fever for most of the past fifteen months. I welcome the following news:

Excerpt from NBC Nightly News, November 2, 2006:

But now the top federal public heath agency is declaring that it is real, and that it affects more than 1 million Americans — four times as many women as men.

"People genuinely are suffering and there are things we can do to genuinely help them," says Dr. Julie Gerberding, who heads the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). "And we need to take this seriously as a real illness for a lot of people."

More:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15535705/

"Since 2001, the State Department estimates that up to 130 million women worldwide have undergone circumcision."--CNN, Nov 1, 2006

More:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/11/01/female.circumcision.ap/index.html