Giving by Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton’s recent book Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World brings together examples of how people are giving time, money, and skills to change the world for the better. Some of my favorite people and organizations are discussed — such as Kiva, Ashoka, ONE, ShoreBank, and Sustainable South Bronx — as well as many that I didn’t know about. It’s a bracing wake-up call for for those who think the country is mired in apathy.

In addition to his own Clinton Foundation, Clinton devotes considerable space to the medical missionary work of Paul Farmer, whose book The Uses of Haiti I reviewed at length for Transition. There’s also a chapter on Heifer International, whose marketing I have admired for years. Heifer not only brings home the personal impact of even small gifts, but its attractively produced “magalogs” make giving a donation feel like shopping for a friend. It was good to read that their work is as effective as their marketing.

Clinton discusses organizations that have given books for needy schoolchildren in Zimbabwe and Nepal, but doesn’t mention Books for Africa, which has been doing excellent work for years. When my mother visited me in Zimbabwe in 1990, she brought a suitcase of medical instruments of the sort that American hospitals use once and discard. I was pleased to see that an organization called Doc to Dock is now collecting and distributing them on a much wider basis.

Change in Zimbabwe, at last

When I first went to Zimbabwe, in 1990, I had spent the previous several years raising funds for political prisoners in South Africa and Namibia. I was an admirer of Robert Mugabe because of his support for the ANC, and because he had overturned the expectations of people who expected him to be a tinpot dictator. He had improved health and education in the rural areas, welcomed foreign investors, and given farms back to white commercial farmers who had fled the country. I was troubled by the massacres a few years earlier in Matabeleland — in retrospect I should have been a lot more troubled — but I thought Zimbabwe could have ended up with a leader much worse than Mugabe.

By the end of my six months in the country, I had changed my mind. It was an election year, and thugs belonging to the ruling party’s “youth league” were intimidating and beating up supporters of the opposition. The opposition candidate for vice president was shot, though he survived. Other people who were inconvenient to the government tended to die in car crashes, sometimes in collisions with armored vehicles.

Joshua Nkomo, the widely respected leader of the ZAPU party, had been harmlessly neutralized as a minister without portfolio. I saw him at a ceremony for the tenth anniversary of the country’s independence — a huge sad man in a suit, staring at his lap. Meanwhile the ruling ZANU party was finishing construction on a new and brutal-looking tower in Harare.

Eighteen long years later, Zimbabwe’s economy is in ruins and its people starving. When I was there, the largest bill in general circulation was a blue note worth twenty Zimbabwean dollars. As I recall, it was worth about ten dollars. In January this year, the government printed new money:

On Jan. 18, Zimbabwe’s reserve bank put a $10 million bill into general circulation, a maroon-tinged piece of paper with a sketch of water gushing through a dam that might well have symbolized the escaping value of the note itself. Worth enough at the time to buy a chicken, it now will barely buy a few eggs, with a value of about 40 cents.

As I write, Mugabe has admitted that ZANU has lost control of Parliament, but he has not yet stepped down. I hope he does so soon, that there is a peaceful transition of power, and that foreign governments and aid agencies provide the country with help that actually promotes development and not debt and dependency.

A revealing comment by George Will

On one of the Sunday talk shows, he said this with his usual straight face (I’m quoting from memory): “I never let my kids use the word fair. I didn’t want them to grow up to be liberals.”

A revealing comment by Dick Cheney

Wednesday, March 19, 2008:
Martha Raddatz, ABC’s Good Morning America: Two-thirds of Americans say [the Iraq War is] not worth fighting.

Vice President Dick Cheney: So?

The Water Engine

About thirty years ago, David Mamet wrote a play about a man who invents an engine that runs on water. (Dwight Schultz of The A-Team played the inventor on stage at the Public Theater, and William H. Macy played him for a cable production.) I haven’t seen it, but I gather that things don’t go well for the inventor and his invention when they run up against the forces of capitalism.

Now a researcher from Pennsylvania named John Kanzius has found a way to burn salt water by exposing it to radio waves of a certain frequency. (Kanzius had been investigating the use of radio waves to treat cancer.) It’s not clear whether this method will ever produce more energy than it uses, but it’s surprising and encouraging that seemingly simple discoveries like this are still being made. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for the continuing health and safety of Mr. Kanzius.