Kensinger on Staten Island

Nathan Kensinger continues to explore corners of the city that I’m curious about but too nervous to visit myself. (The phrase “packs of wild dogs” comes up frequently on his blog.)

Richmond Parkway Interchange, Kensinger’s latest photo essay, sheds light on an episode from late in the career of Master Builder Robert Moses.

One reminder of the Master Builder’s incomplete mission to redesign the city’s infrastructure still hovers above Staten Island. Moses built more than 400 miles of parkways during his long reign, but the Richmond Parkway Interchange—one mile of twisting concrete paths - is a symbol of his final days in power. It has been abandoned for 45 years.

The Richmond Parkway “was originally intended to be 9.5 miles long” according to the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, and would have connected southern Staten Island to the Staten Island Expressway via the Richmond Parkway Interchange, providing quick access to the nearby Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which was completed in 1964 as “the last great public works project in New York City overseen by Robert Moses,” according to Wikipedia. The plan for the parkway was to cut through what is now the Staten Island Greenbelt, tearing down pristine forests, threatening Pouch Camp and devastating the Blood Root Valley.

Kensinger’s photos remind me of Tim Butcher’s descriptions in Blood River of roads and rail lines being engulfed by forest in the eastern Congo, until some disappear completely. 

Mugabe gets the band back together

One of the best reasons to travel, I think, is that you come to care about the rest of the world. I visited Malawi, Zimbabwe, Nepal, and Haiti when each of them was relatively peaceful and prosperous, and so their subsequent disasters have hit me harder than they would have otherwise.

Peter Godwin, whose Rhodesian childhood was recounted in his memoir Mukiwa, returned to Zimbabwe in 2008, when Robert Mugabe—already the oldest national leader in the world—had just lost the presidential election and was expected to step down. The country’s economy had been devastated to the point where you needed a brick of currency to buy a cup of coffee. In 1990, when I spent six months in Zimbabwe, the highest note in circulation was for twenty dollars. In 2008, the government was printing trillion-dollar notes.

As Godwin describes, the result was that even urban dwellers were turning to subsistence agriculture, growing corn on the median strips of highways, cooking over wood fires in houses that no longer had gas and electricity, and showing up at the office smelling of woodsmoke. But worst of all, and the focus of this book, was the reign of terror that Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party unleashed to stop political change.

As far as I can tell, there is no one Godwin met during his travels through Zimbabwe that I met myself when I was there. Yet in a way I feel I know them. The names are the names of people I met—Lovemore, Trymore, Tapiwa, Chenjerai, Tichaona—or they have a familiar Zimbabwean flavor. I knew a government official named Devious; Godwin met a man named Obvious. There are young women with old-fashioned English names, and a little girl named Pestilence—a sign that the Shona care more about the sound of English names than the exact meaning.

Conversational habits take me back too: the soft handclap greeting of rural women, the interjection “shame,” scraps of remembered Shona like makorokoto (congratulations) and pamusoroi (excuse me), and the ingrained use of “too” to mean “very.” “There are too many animals here,” says a senator of the opposition MDC party. “Leopard and kudu, mambas and puff adders.”

The places are familiar too. Living in Eastlea and working at a government office on Herbert Chitepo Avenue, I used to see the Meikles and Monomatapa hotels, the national art museum and the US embassy practically every day. I visited Cecil Rhodes’ grave (where Godwin’s eccentric sister claims to have had sex) and climbed dwalas like the ones he mentions: humped granite hills sometimes called whalebacks.

The truth about Mugabe should have been clear at least since the early 1980s, not long after he took power as the leader of an independent Zimbabwe. That’s when he unleashed the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland, with the aim of crushing the opposition ZAPU party. Godwin puts the death toll at 20,000 civilians, or about 1% of the country’s population.

Yet because Mugabe was a plausible, well-spoken man with a business suit and several college degrees, many people resisted the idea that he was a killer and a dictator. Foreign investors were pleased that he didn’t nationalize their businesses, as he was expected to do. Progressives were pleased that he supported the ANC and put money into health and education.

I didn’t change my mind about Mugabe until 1990. It was an election year, and members of the ZANU-PF Youth League broke up rallies of the opposition Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM) and attacked its candidates. ZUM’s vice presidential candidate was shot and wounded, other candidates were killed, and several critics of the government died in convenient car accidents, sometimes by colliding with armored vehicles belonging to the army.

One sign of how bad things became in Zimbabwe is that Godwin doesn’t even mention the election violence of 1990. But he does note that to carry out the postelection attacks of 2008, Mugabe got his old band back together.

The pace of violence picks up around the country as Operation Ngatipedzenavo—“Let Us Finish Them Off”—gets under way. Mugabe’s election strategy has been completely militarized. The securocrats have taken over the day-to-day running of the campaign. The team that Mugabe has put in charge of the operation is led by the Minister of Defense, Sydney Sekeremai, working with Air Marshal Perence Shiri and General Constantine Chiwenga, out of Joint Operations Command. It’s the same dream team that carried out the Matabeleland massacres twenty-five years before, when Perence “Black Jesus” Shiri commanded the North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, alongside Chiwenga, under the then Minister of Defense, Sydney Sekeremai. They are all architects of a previous genocide.

When The Fear was first published, its subtitle was “The Last Days of Robert Mugabe.” Now its subtitle is the less optimistic “Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.”

Pity the Nation

I first encountered Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk’s monumental book about Lebanon, years ago in the stacks of the Cambridge Public Library. I opened it and was immediately gripped by the power and urgency of his writing. Here is one of many examples, from p. 214.

The third aircraft came from above our heads. Perhaps the pilot feared a ground-to-air missile attack, for he brought his plane down in a sharp twisting dive that made us all catch our breath. From his aircraft there emerged a number of balloons that exploded behind the jet in a blaze of phosphorus. The balloons spilled out of the plane in its crazy dive, tracing the pattern of its descent in a spiral staircase of green light and fire that trailed down the summer sky. Through the field-glasses I caught a momentary image of the F-16—drab-brown camouflage on its wings and the sun-glint sparkle of the cockpit canopy—before the blast waves came banging round us. From that fearsome wadi there came a ripple of explosions that spread along the river bed and sent those dark fingers of smoke jabbing upwards again, like a dead hand rising from the ground.

More than a decade later, I have finally read the book (taking occasional breaks to read other books). It is an overwhelming and distressing experience—distressing not only because of the suffering he describes, but because you find yourself savoring the language that he uses to describe it. Take out the political analysis, change some names, and you would be left with a great modern war novel.

The political analysis is too important to take out, though. Political discourse has become crude and polarized, especially in recent years. To ask why the 9/11 attackers destroyed the World Trade Center can get you labeled as a terrorist sympathizer. Suggesting that a massive “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad is a form of terrorism can get you labeled as unpatriotic. And simply to describe the actions of the Israeli Defense Force, as Fisk does, can get you labeled as anti-Semitic. And so it has proved.

Language itself is central to the book, and in laying bare the ways in which the debasement of language has led to the debasement of political discourse, Fisk is a modern Orwell.

At one point during the period when the PLO was based in Lebanon, when Syria had all but occupied the country, when Israel was launching attacks, and when Phalangist and other militias were battling for territory, Fisk says there were six armies in the country. None of them, he makes clear, were good guys. Each labeled its opponents as “terrorists.”

One of Fisk’s most useful recommendations—unhappily never heeded—is to retire that word. Terrorist is a word that spreads darkness rather than light. It shuts down critical thinking and encourages us to treat our opponents as less than human. Lebanon made the absurdity of the term especially plain, because (as Fisk argued to his editors at the London Times), an honest observer would conclude that if any of the armed factions were terrorist then they were all terrorist.

Andrew Tobias on the national debt

Paul Krugman has been beating this drum again and again and again ... but sometimes you need a fresh perspective on the same point of view.

Andrew Tobias provides this in his latest column. Here’s an excerpt.

I don’t usually use farm analogies, but here’s one.  Let’s say the previous farmer left his equipment out in the rain and snow for decades so it froze, cracked, and rusted . . . even as he borrowed like mad to finance an unnecessary range war and lavish gifts to his richest friends, all the while neglecting the need for crop rotation.  Over the years, he ran up big losses and an enormous debt.  Okay?  Now you’ve just been handed the deed to the farm.  The underlying assets are outstanding – fertile soil and a talented local labor force.  So what do you do?  To right things, do you (a) fire the one mechanic who can actually keep one of the tractors running; stop buying feed for the chickens (you raise chickens); and eschew the additional debt you’d have to take on to buy seeds and plant the summer crop?  Or do you (b) stop giving your richest friends lavish gifts, make peace with the cowmen, and borrow enough to plant the crop and get the farm running efficiently?

Shortchanged on wages and Social Security

The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer.

There are many ways to parse what’s going on, and previous posts have touched on unemployment (more than once), financial deregulation (more than once), misperceptions about who has the money, credit card abuses, and a misunderstanding of risk.

The idea that Social Security is not going to be there for the next generation of retirees is gradually hardening into conventional wisdom and a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the implication that the desire to keep it is a symptom of greed and self-indulgence on the part of baby boomers. Get Radical: Raise Social Security, an op-ed in the New York Times by labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, offers a different take.

Retirees today are shortchanged on Social Security because they have been shortchanged on wages for their entire working lives. The labor economist Richard B. Freeman points out that the hourly earnings of workers dropped by 8 percent from 1973 to 2005 while productivity shot up 55 percent or more. The United States is one of the few developed countries where workers are routinely cheated of a share in higher productivity.

And where has the money from the extra productivity gone? It’s gone right to the top, to the top few percent. If wages had been paid fairly based on productivity, there would have been enough money subject to the payroll tax to avoid even a modest shortfall.