Bill Murray's Blog, page 45
January 8, 2019
Emergency?
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There is a debate this afternoon about whether the president’s speech tonight should be aired by the broadcast networks (the cable channels will carry it). I believe there is a more important topic for discussion. If the president uses the speech tonight to declare a state of emergency, go and immediately read this.
Trump still undecided on declaring a national emergency over border security ahead of tonight’s Oval Office address. https://t.co/F1Fdkq6Ydq
— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) January 8, 2019
January 7, 2019
New Monday Magazine Column
This month’s column in the Monday Magazine at 3QuarksDaily is Inside Papua New Guinea. I’ll publish it here later this week.
January 6, 2019
The Cuban Revolution Turns 60
Cuba celebrated the 60th anniversary of its revolution last week, with 2018 tourist arrivals at 4.75 million, as Jon Lee Anderson points out, “nearly double that of just four years ago, when President Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced their diplomatic breakthrough, which restored relations between the United States and Cuba after a half-century’s rupture.”
Admittedly, U.S. citizens came late to the Cuba tourism game. Canadians and Europeans have been flying in for years, but often for package beach vacations, on which they’d be shuttled from airport to (government-owned) resort for a few days in the sun, never having contact with Cubans other than government-approved resort workers.
My wife and I spent a long weekend in Havana on an early Obama administration “exchange” visit. Here are some first impressions I wrote on our return in March, 2012:
Havana, Cuba: We jump into a priceless, ‘50s vintage yellow convertible taxi and ask for a ride to ‘Old Havana.’ Where in Old Havana? We don’t know. We shrug, everybody smiles and we just go.
Ramon the Cabbie pulls to the curb, fumbles in the glove box, pulls out a preposterously big cigar, stuffs it in my mouth, gives me a light and puts his cowboy hat on my head. Everything is fabulous.
We’re out on the Malecón, Havana’s beloved corniche, the sea to the left, Havana on the right. There’s a couple of side-by-side soccer matches going on in front of a Communist-era grandstand. You can tell Communist design. Not a lot of traffic on the Malecón even though it’s midday.
Down toward the old center buildings fast shedding paint look to have been real showpieces in the past. The past is slipping away fast, though. Water came over the sea wall in one hurricane or another, flooded this part of the city for five long blocks inland, and nothing’s been done to fix it.
Ramon drops us beside the Plaza de Armas. It’s a gorgeous day with a breeze off the sea. People doze in the shade, kids play. There’s a game of checkers. A dog chews a bone.
The little park is a flea market of revolutionary history books, musty encyclopedias, Hemingway novels, and Tarzan comics, but the booksellers aren’t terribly mercantile. They read their books.
Cubans are proud of their collective literacy, a pet Castro project of the early revolution. Kids as young as 14 were sent into the countryside to raise Cuban literacy, from 23 percent at the time to nearly 100 percent today. Literacy and free medical care – those are the Castro legacies you’ll hear about again and again.
The whole afternoon we’re lost in old Havana. We do the slow walk up Obispo Street, the cobbled pedestrian thoroughfare into town. Hemingway’s old haunt, the Hotel Ambos Mundos, is in fine repair. There’s a shrine where they say he wrote The Old Man and the Sea beside a turtle pond. Each turtle is perched on its own rock.
Five old men sing and play over a big spread of sidewalk. A lady shakes a maraca and holds out a hat. Can’t tell if she works for them or she’s the boss, driving these doddering old guys to keep playing.
•••••
We hear a good, salacious rumor that famous Americans have been here lately for medical treatment. Who?
The man who tells us can’t name names, but “They can be actors, singers….”
They come in secret because it’s no good to be treated by Communists, “Evil Red,” he grins.
“In Cuba we need a new generation of leaders,” he offers. Right, we say, because Raoul is 80.
“Anyway, Fidel will choose when to die,” he says, and announce it in one of his hours-long speeches.
“Next Thursday at 11:45,” he’ll say.
•••••
In 1956 Fidel Castro and 81 other revolutionaries sailed from Tuxpan, Mexico to foment revolution. Granma was the name of his ship. Now it’s the name of the party paper.
The headline in today’s Granma is “Revolucion no, Zarpazo!” It’s a full page potted tract by Fidel Castro, a rant against the coup that brought Fulgencio Battista to power (that’s his predecessor) in 1952.
This morning’s Granma is tiny, just ten pages. It costs 20 local pesetas, less than a penny, but the press run is limited, so some buy an early copy, read it, then resell it after the newsstand sells out.
Granma, the ship, is on display in a pavilion behind glass. You know how when you go to a stadium or arena, it feels smaller than it looks on TV? Granma the ship is the opposite.
You stand alongside a soldier-guard on an elevated platform. The Granma’s all polished and shiny and looks for all the world like Fidel scored a party boat and it would have been more fun just to hang out on board, smoking cigars and drinking rum.
The founding Cuban legend describes steely determination, rationing and hardship on the crossing to Mexico, but I’m skeptical. There’s an enclosed cabin just behind the wheel. I imagine a seven-day interregnum of air-conditioning, alcohol and comraderie before the more poignant (and dangerous) business of revolucion.
Next door in the Museum of the Revolucion, the former Palace, you’ll see Battista’s gold-plated phone, the Presidential toilet (tiled and bare), and a trick door attached to stairs for a quick and sneaky exit from the Presidential suite. Too many rooms of fatigues, boots and war-fighting memorabilia later you’ll see, I guess, the revolutionary omelet maker, a pan in two fold-over parts.
•••••
There hasn’t been a Cuban Congress in 53 years. When it last met, in 1959, all these museum relics were brand new. Now the Capitol building is the Academy of Sciences. It’s huge and imposing like the U.S. Capitol, but the buildings directly across the street are run down and propped up, fast slumping into tropical torpor. Buildings are collapsing in Havana at an alarming rate.
Now, revolutionaries don’t arrange flowers. They’re otherwise focused and just don’t have time for aesthetics or city planning or urban design. With the Cuban revolución in it’s 50’s, and no pocket money for beautification, it shows. Havana is listing to the left.
If a building was built before the revolución it’s architecturally Spanish, it’s old and it’s falling apart. If it was built during the next thirty years it’s architecturally Russian, made of concrete and also falling apart. And nothing much besides a few tourist hotels has been built since.[image error]
Entrepreneurs stake out the Capitol with their antique cars, sit a tourist down behind the wheel of, say, a sky blue Ford Fairlane with fins, give him a cigar and snap away with the tourist’s camera. Two minutes, ten bucks. It’s smart business, but hang on to that old Fairlane. Don’t even think of buying a new car with your tourist profits because sooner or later you’ll have to prove where you got the money without earning it privately, which is not a good thing to go around doing in Cuba.
It never would do for the self-employed to become wealthy, and it won’t do now in the new, government sanctioned but tightly watched “bonsai businesses,” as the economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe describes them.
Mind you, if you can show that you’ve left your wife and six month old daughter to go off to Venezuela on an approved contract job to earn the money, now that’s just fine.
•••••
The legacy hotel, perched on a crag above the sea, is the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, before the revolucion a legendary haunt of gangsters, starlets and Frank Sinatra. It’s the only place to stay in Havana.
It bustles with people important and otherwise, and carries on with a stiff upper lip like the Victoria Falls Hotel in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. There are fine cigars and Mojitos, dining and live entertainment, and a gift shop packed with Che Guevara T-shirts.
Che Guevara has been dead since you were born, but he still leads the revolucion. Che’s multi-story image covers the Interior Ministry. You could imagine they’re busy inside suppressing freedom, but they hold the freedom fighter close. He’s the biggest legend, the most quotable and the most handsome. Cuba exports fine cigars, rum, and Che memorabilia.
We stay at the Cohiba, one of Spanish chain SolMelia’s three Havana hotels, a couple kilometers past the Nacional Hotel away from Old Havana. It’s a glass tower off to itself.
SolMelia is the world’s biggest operator of holiday resorts, with 25 properties in Cuba and it looks like the biggest beneficiary of Cuba’s need for tourist money. Two and a half million tourists visit Cuba every year, mostly for the beaches.
Eight SolMelia properties are all-inclusive beach resorts in Varadero, seventy miles up the coast. Varadero has its own international airport and charters come from Berlin and Brussels, Manchester and Moscow. It’s perfect for the regime. Fly in – fly out vacations for visitors with hard currency who never see Cuban socialism or meet a non-vetted Cuban.
•••••
In Cathedral Square, women in traditional costumes sit at tables, smile easygoing smiles and smoke fat cigars for photos and tips. There’s a big banner welcoming the Pope.
The cathedral is cool, dark and quiet inside. Outside, noise and busyness precede a rolling carnival of drummers and women on stilts. It rumbles through the square competing with musicians playing in front of a busy restaurant. A tout comes around to each table collecting donations for the band.
Over rice with pork cutlets and Bucanero beer, the man at the next table explains how cell phones are so expensive that when his rings, he gets the number from caller ID and goes to a pay phone to call back. In Cuba there are still pay phones. And he says, the internet just doesn’t exist.
He shows us his family’s ration booklet. You can augment the ration as your finances allow, but Cubans start the month with an allotment of rice, grain, cooking oil, sugar, soap, salt and coffee, among other things, and one chicken.
A display window in Old Havana sums up the differences between the U.S. and Cuba. Think of the array of brewers, cookers, choppers and blenders in your neighborhood kitchen store. This display offers a serving bowl, seven stackable Tupperware-like containers, an ice chest, two plastic ice trays, a cutting board and a set of clear plastic spice containers.
•••••
Still, Cuba has its charms. From the suspended animation of Havana, Cubans have distilled a composure and a be-here-now sense that’s nothing like the white-knuckled striving of our America. Cuba is comfortable in it’s skin.
And adaptable. Every Cuban is a backyard mechanic. How else do they keep those ’57 Chevys on the road? They’re everywhere, just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. Maybe you can get replacement wipers from your uncle in Miami. They say spare parts from Russian Volga sedans sometimes work, too.
For Americans, the doors to Cuba are more open than ever. There were seven charters leaving Miami the morning of our flight down and nine from Havana to Florida the day we came back.
So how does it work? It’s not illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba, but it’s illegal to spend dollars, in line with the larger U.S. embargo of the island. That’s why your license comes from the U.S. Treasury Department.
You get that license easily enough, by signing up with an accredited travel company. Today there are hundreds, offering enough specialty programs that you’re sure to find one that suits you.
Havana is one-of-a-kind and it’s only 45 minutes from Miami. Get on down there and poke around a little bit. Soak up the ambience. Kick those old tires. See what you think before the old order dies.
•••••
Our hotel room has a privileged 14th floor view. It’s a gorgeous Saturday afternoon and I’m surveying a picturesque and choppy sea. It’s deep tropical blue as far as you can see, but something’s not quite right. It’s a vague idea that won’t form right away.
What slowly sinks in is that, that’s all you see. Horizon to horizon there are no pleasure boats. Some two and a quarter million people in Havana and not a sailboat on the sea. No skiers behind motorboats. No jet skis or parasails or drunken glass-bottom tours.
Now I can’t quit thinking about it.
•••••
Cuba photos on EarthPhotos.com.
January 5, 2019
In Iceland There Are Glacier Monitors
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Nice story here about the glacier monitors in Iceland. Often it’s a family business.
The Icelandic Families Tracking Climate Change With Measuring Tape, volunteers who have been monitoring glaciers for generations are firsthand witnesses to a warming Arctic landscape, by Gloria Dickie.
More Iceland photos here at EarthPhotos.com.
January 4, 2019
Weekend Reading
It has been a little quiet at CS&W over the holidays, and January will stay relatively quiet as we try to internet detox this month. We’re opting to stay off the internet much more in January, my wife and I, to see if it makes us better people. We’ll let you know. Meanwhile, some interesting news coming this spring that will alter the whole shape of this website. Can’t tell you for a couple of months.
And meanwhile, anytime is a good time to scroll through what’s up at 3 Quarks Daily, but next Monday will be an especially good time, when I’ll have my monthly column in the Monday Magazine (Topic hint: see photo). For now, some intriguing reading for the weekend:
– What Driving Teaches Us About Living by Rachel Cusk. She’s so good.
– What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit. Comprehensive roundup of what the rest of Europe thinks about Brexit.
– The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi by Amitav Ghosh. 1984 was not a good year for India.
– There’s No Free Will? You Can’t Possibly Believe That by Tim Sommers
– The Caucasus: No Longer Just Russia’s Neighborhood by Thomas de Wall. What’s up down there?
– How My Father Made Landfall. Sylvia Poggioli’s parents.
– Seattle Under Siege by Christopher F. Rufo. What’s going wrong?
– The Children of the Revolution by James David Banker Frightening Red Guards in China.
– Breath of life by Brian Victoria. Shinto shows the debt to animism of organized religions today.
See you next week.
January 2, 2019
Quotes: The State of the USA 2019
“If my 12-year-old girl is out babysitting a 3-year-old and the 3-year-old walks out of mom and dad’s bedroom with a handgun or a shotgun, she needs to know how to handle that,” Foster said.”
– From a story headlined Iowa School Districts Roll Out Mandatory Gun Training For Middle Schoolers.
January 1, 2019
Quotes: Ultima Thule
The spacecraft New Horizons collected information as it passed an object in the Kuiper Belt early today, four billion miles from earth.
“even travelling at the speed of light, the data will take six hours to reach home.”
December 21, 2018
President of Turkmenistan Really Lets Go
Gee, what a soulful fellow Berdymukhamedov is.
Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and his grandson Kerimguly rocking out in English and German! pic.twitter.com/VDlxS8kite
— Maximilian Hess (@zakavkaza) December 21, 2018
Weekend Reading
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Last night Fox News treated the U.S. Defense Secretary’s resignation as a wonderful little holiday “retirement,” as much as possible gliding past the stark policy differences General James Mattis spelled out in his resignation letter. Normally this kind of thing makes me mad. But MSNBC and CNN were just as busy advancing their own agendas. Their coverage, first and foremost, framed the president as dangerous and unhinged, gliding over in their own way whether removing 2000 troops from Syria might be a reasonable idea. Conor Friedersdorf makes this point better than I can, here:
” … disdain for Trump and excessive deference to the foreign-policy establishment has caused much of the news media to err in their coverage—to treat the risky, costly, unconstitutional policy of maintaining a troop presence in Syria indefinitely as though it is obviously best, and to fail to treat the withdrawal of troops as a legitimate, reasonable position, even though it fulfills a campaign promise, enjoys popular support, remedies ongoing illegality, and has many plausible arguments that recommend it over quite unappealing alternatives.”
Andrew Sullivan strikes the same note this morning, calling it “astonishing”
” … how the Democrats and much of the liberal Establishment now supports an unending occupation of yet another Middle Eastern country.”
The point to be borne in mind, always, is that the media are not in this just to produce an informed electorate.
•••••
Around here, it seems like every weekend’s activities lately are restricted to indoors because of rain or snow. Which fits for the winter solstice, and which sets up another ideal weekend for absorbing reading. Here are a few suggestions:
– I thoroughly enjoyed a long travelogue titled A Week In Xinjiang’s Absolute Surveillance State by Vadim Mikhailov.
– As a photographer with 20,000 or so photos online, I’m at a momentary loss as to what to think of These Portraits Were Made by AI: None of These People Exist by Michael Zhang. Astounding.
– Babylon Berlin, The German Capital at a Crossroads by Lars-Olav Beier, Hilmar Schmundt and Volker Weidermann
– What to read by African authors: My year of reading African women by Gary Younge
– A whole bunch of words about the BBC: Can’t Afford to Tell the Truth by Owen Bennett-Jones
– And finally, Good, the bad and the unknown: what a no‑deal Brexit looks like from the London Times.
Happy holidays to you and yours. See you next week.
December 16, 2018
Polish Politics
Gdansk, Poland
Want to share what I think is an insightful article on the current state of politics in Poland in The American Interest. It’s by Gazeta Wyborcza columnist Katarzyna Wężyk. Read it here.
Here are some quotes:
Polish “Neo-authoritarianism … accepts democratic elections. But … only as a way to give the majority a mandate to govern unencumbered by minority rights.”
“We ‘normal’ people have to stick together, the pitch goes, form an impenetrable front against dangerous outside forces, and not let our unity be eroded by pity for the undeserving.”
“Polish neo-authoritarianism is … based on shared hostility toward the elites and the weak—women, refugees, those with ‘pathology’ (that is, the poorest, people with alcohol or drug problems, broken families)—and bound by the sense that “normal” people have a right to dominate these groups.
The figure of a refugee— the ultimate Other, so different as to be barely recognizable as human and thus dangerous—was significant in ensuring a PiS (Law and Justice Party) victory. (PiS leader Jarosław) Kaczyński warned during the campaign that migrants carry ‘all sorts of parasites and protozoa, which, while not dangerous in the organisms of these people, could be dangerous here.’”
“Law and Justice gave its supporters … a kind of empowerment, albeit an empowerment that comes from the ability to humiliate, belittle, and bully others, and then to feel justified in so doing. It offers a surface narrative of regaining dignity, acquiring national pride, and restoring justice; but its underside exudes darker undertones of punishment, exclusion, and contempt.”
Warsaw, Poland and the Vistula River
