Daily Office:
Tuesday
Morning
¶ Mind the Gap: Five years ago today, Sergio Vieira de Mello, along with twenty-one other people, was killed in a Baghdad bombing that targeted his United Nations mission. Samantha Power considers the consequences.
Noon
¶ Entwistle: Do you remember the Entwistle case? (Brit murders American wife and child in Massachusetts, then flies to Nottinghamshire, where he settles in with his parents.) No, I don’t either. But Jonathan Raban makes it digitally interesting (as distinct from ghoulishly interesting), at the London Review of Books.
Night
¶ Nearby: Young upwardly-mobile Asian-Americans are not awayly-mobile. They’re cutting out the historic suburban stage; their bright new places are nearby their parents’ dumps.
Oremus…
Morning, cont’d
§ Gap. What Ms Power does not mention — and this is what struck me as I read her piece — is the gap between the people whom aid organizations seek to aid and the “nations” that more or less fail to protect them — a gap eerily reflected in the names borne by many aid organizations: the United Nations, the International Rescue Committee.
Both the idea and the reality of the nation are globally dubious today, and terrorists are thriving in the corners where nations are crumbling fastest — or, indeed, have never taken hold, as in much of Afghanistan. Ms Power calls for leadership. I think that we may need some thinkership first.
Noon, cont’d
§ Entwistle. Raban approaches the murderer, an eBay flim-flammer, as “an Internet native.”
On his websites, he’d shown himself to be a prisoner to his illogical grammar, crappy writing, flights of vainglorious unrealism and beggarly imagination; nothing he’d done on the internet was as crappily written as this lame American scenario, in which the solution to a very ordinary predicament was a Colt revolver and a box of ammo. His latest scheme bore a strong generic resemblance to all his others in its combination of technical competence and human cluelessness.
He was in the grip of another of his tall stories. I doubt that there was anything strange about his driving as he got back on the freeway and returned to Hopkinton. The sequence of necessary actions was mapped out for him, and he carried out each one with mechanical proficiency.
Night, cont’d
§ Nearby. But the rest of us can get a deal on any floor with a “4” in its number (14, 24, &c). In Chinese, “four” sounds like “death.”