Bill Murray's Blog, page 71
January 19, 2018
Quotes: Davos Time Again
“Every January, the Davos gathering sounds a little more bemused about what is happening in the world outside. In 2016 it worried about the threat of mass disease, just as the Ebola threat was receding. In 2015, its annual report dwelt on the return of geopolitics following Russia’s annexation of Crimea the year before. In its first report in 2006 it was anxious about epidemics and the risk of terrorism after the Asian flu crisis and the London Underground attacks. And so on. Davos specializes in projecting the future from a recent past that took it by surprise.”
Edward Luce in The Retreat of Western Liberalism
Weekend Reading
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The deep south is still stuck in our cold wave. Here are some suggestions for another indoor weekend of interesting reading:
A Thousand and One Nights at the Call Centre by Anjali Puri at TheWire.in, which leads to
The Best Job in Town by Katherine Boo (pdf)
Trans-Siberian Railway by Giulia Mangione in Calvert Journal
My year of living ignorantly: I entered a news blackout the day Trump was elected by Christopher Hebert in the Guardian
When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships by Anne Ewbank at Atlas Obscura
Transcript of interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson from U.S. House Intelligence Committee (pdf)
Got time to buy me a cup of coffee?
Vignette: Côte d’Ivoire
Some years ago:
“On the northwest edge of town near the beginning of the road to Dabou is the Parc du Banco. Several hundred meters beyond the dirt road entrance to the park you’ll see … Africa’s largest outdoor laundrette – some 750 fanicos (washermen), mostly Burkinabé and none Ivorian, jammed together … in the middle of a small stream frantically rubbing clothes on huge stones held in place by old car tyres.”
Some days are more freighted than others, and today ranks low on the portent scale, for today our only mission is to photograph a laundrette.
Abidjan lies steaming at dawn. The business district they call Plateau is not a geographic plateau like Harare, not an elevated place of extended sight lines and bracing air. Abidjan squats at sea level, sticky and claustral, flat and dense with eyes on the Atlantic Ocean along the west African Cote d’Ivoire.
A lead-footed swelter grinds down; the scent of ill will drifts close. When the sun takes hold and the work day begins, languor and sloth set the pace: commerce with little vigor, exertion with reluctance, the humdrum jostle of a poor city.
Yet long before the sun, before the city stirred, a stealth army of rail-thin, ragged-dressed foreign boys fanned out across Abidjan. Their mission: to collect dirty laundry. They brought ten thousand sweaty shirts and dirty socks to the River Banco and set about sudsing, well before the sun would crest the hill.
Unlikely as it seems, determined young foreigners yearn and scramble for this work, here, where the future shines down bright as the equatorial sun. Here, take-home pay is more than double back up the road in Burkina Faso. In the Ivorian laundry trade there is a trade union and there are union dues. You can be fired.
If young Burkinabé are determined to work, if they come and collect the sweat-caked shirts and socks, suds and pound them all on rocks, deliver them back and do it right, they’ll pocket a hundred bucks a week.
•••••
You can’t take pictures if you don’t go early. Too late and all you’ll see is clothes drying in the grass. This haste forces a rookie mistake.
New in town, brash, we bound straight out of bed traipsing, with not even a look in the mirror. Brush our teeth, put back on yesterday’s clothes, get a cab, no questions asked or answered, out and gone. With no counsel or good sense.
Cabs all fiery orange here, might be any kind of car. Open up and climb in. This one even has a meter. Just kind of sitting out there idling on the curb. He’s not exactly fired with passion for the new day, is he? Could we be his last fare of last night?
First, to find a common language: Shona speakers in Zimbabwe, Setswana speakers in Botswana, the Swahili-speaking Maasai, pretty much everybody will try – except French colonial officialdom, we noted at immigration, and, as we find out now, Ivorian cabbies. This will be done in either French, or French.
So we’ve got this guy right off the jump, off and rolling between buildings the sun hasn’t yet cleared. Angling to hustle out to Banco Park before shirt hits stone we explain, “Parc du Banco sur l’autoroute à Dabou.” The Banco Park out on the Dabou Road. We point at a map but he’s already driving. He nods and says he’ll need trente mille Francs (30,000 CFA).
It takes important minutes to find out, but as it happens, this most uncheerful gentleman seized on the word Dabou, which is a town 37 kilometers west of Abidjan along the coast. Heard nothing before or after, and he is heading out of town fast as if he were leaving work for the day and Dabou was his home.
We work this out at the point when we can look forward and back and see nothing resembling a park to either cooking smoke-filled horizon, and hardly another car, besides.
We shake our heads, pose as forceful. He poses back wounded, as if he’s never heard of any Parc du Banco and relents to something we’re not asking, okay okay then, only 20,000, then, as we hurtle along the coast.
Non non non, NON Dabou-ville!
This pains him in a theatrical way, but we match his drama with scowls and when we get back to Abidjan, to the hotel where we started, we pay him for his trouble.
And so we do what we should have done in the first place – inquire at the man-cave of a front desk. There we find one gentleman getting a jump on his daily torpor in the dark toward the back. Pinched and full of regret, he will have to speak some English now, because it’s his job.
He sets us up with a guy named Simeon, a graying older chap, who drives for the hotel. He knows all about Parc du Banco, of course. It will take about an hour and he quotes 3500. Progress.
Simeon heads back north out of town. At the junction where we went wrong the first time, there’s a big sign off to the right, “Tampon Express.” Maybe that means something else here?
Serried ranks of sellers are forming along the verge, rattling around staking out patches of gravel, setting up shop for another day of peddling folding fans and drinks and vegetables coated brown by traffic dust. We didn’t have much to do today, yet we fear we have already failed before 8:00 a.m., but Simeon makes a turn onto at a dirt track, motors over a hill and here we are.
The laundry has come back to life. Color returns with the sun. The birds have been here all along. A pretty wildflower. Butterflies. Gnats en pirouette in a random shaft of sunbeam. Close to the water like this, it’s an agreeable time of the morning, heat not stifling, sweat yet to incite insects.
You can smell the mud from heavily trod paths along the riverbank. At this remove, the rush of current makes a jumble of the many dozen voices.
The river brims with industry and purpose, spread out ahead and below. The frenetic, clothes-beating fanicos, the laundrymen, have spawned subordinate industries of sorters and pickers and haulers and folders and food suppliers and cooks, and the odd lone fellow out in midstream lathering up for a bath because there’s no need to waste a perfectly good bar of soap.
Shirtless men hoist bundled clothing onto their heads, bundles that reach higher than they can stretch their arms. Women scrub shirts just beyond the shore, careful to move just far enough out so there is no silt. Boom boxes blast soukous pop. Freshly washed garments hang across half submerged truck tires. Other tires, anchored to boulders farther into the current, hold laundry to be washed, and blocks of soap to wash them.
I cannot see around a crook in the river but I wonder if there is a sort of goalie down there, on duty to stop the runaway pair of socks or bar of soap.
Every last soul is soaking wet, splashing and singing, and two more boys take the opportunity to lather themselves up. An impromptu market has spontaneously lit up alongside. Baguettes and nuts are on offer for now, and more women approach crowned with fruit.
A blond girl and a white guy, the only non-Africans in the park. About as likely as a knife fight at the poetry fair. We draw a crowd fast as Mother Teresa became a saint.
(Back then, which was in the days of guidebooks, they wrote things like “anybody who looks wealthy is at greatest risk,” meaning if you are not African and you are carrying something, you probably won’t have it by the end of the day.)
We climb out and walk to the crest of the hill. Simeon, God bless him, puts on a hangdog look and trails us. The first wave of challengers is just curious kids. The second we stymie by saying in English, really fast, things like, “We don’t speak French and if we did we wouldn’t speak to you and Ouagadougou, Rangoon and Vietnam.”
They are bewildered but they won’t be put off for long. We understand Simeon explaining in French that we don’t know any. They counter with a menacing Anglophone, brawny and imposing.
He proposes that we have no right to take pictures without paying him money. I explain that when he shows me his badge that says tourist police we can talk, while I snap more photos.
For a moment he is befuddled and scowls, “You want to see my badge?”
Simeon comes up close to stand with us, his expression like he has just found a sore inside his mouth. We hold the high ground there on the hill for a few more minutes, under siege, then retreat before pushing too hard on our luck. And all these years later we’ve lost all the photos except this one.
•••••
Got time to buy me a cup of coffee?
January 6, 2018
Quotes: Erdogan & Northern Cyprus
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Not surprising, but I didn’t know this was going on, to considerable protest: the aggressive Islamification of Turkish Cyprus:
When the Hula Sultan mosque in Nicosia opens its doors this year, it will be able to accommodate 3,000 worshippers. Many faithful will be settlers – mainland Turks brought in initially in the 1970s as part of efforts to “Turkify” the north.
“It is not only that Turkish Cypriots have become a minority in their own country, they are now trying to replace the secular education system with religious schools,” said Elcil. “Over 400 imams have been sent here as missionaries to target the children of settlers. Instead of English, lessons in Arabic and the Qur’an are being taught. Religion has never been a point of conflict in Cyprus, nationalism, yes, but not this.”
Read the whole story.
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January 5, 2018
Cold Winter Weekend Reading
Next week I think I’ll post a vignette from a trip to West Africa, some form of which should work its way into my eventual book about African travel. As for now, along with everyone else on the U.S. east coast, I’ll be spending this weekend mostly indoors. Here’s some engaging reading to enjoy by the fire, or wherever you are:
Spies, Dossiers, and the Insane Lengths Restaurants Go to Track and Influence Food Critics in the Washingtonian by Jessica Sidman
One of Us at laphamsquarterly.org by John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Bridge to Nowhere and the Bays Road at East of Elveden by my friend Laurence Mitchell
Will globalisation go into reverse? in Prospect Magazine by Barry Eichengreen
The monster beneath at 1843magazine.com by Helen Gordon
They Began a New Era in The New York Review of Books by James Salter (recommended as a Salter fan. I can also recommend the 2013 compilation of Salter’s travel writing, There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter)
Cheers for now.
Quotes:
“If you can’t breathe, nothing else matters.”
Motto of American Lung Association, quoted in the article Oceans suffocating as huge dead zones quadruple since 1950, scientists warn.
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January 4, 2018
More on This Round of Iran Protests
Further to today’s post about allegations the Iran protests are a redneck affair, @borzou tweets video of the provincials’ big city cousins showing up for the game tonight:
More footage of large crowds of peaceful protesters in central Tehran tonight. “Death to Khamenei,” they chant. https://t.co/hG0xrqcz5O
— Borzou Daragahi
Chinese World Dominance, in Photos
There is an outstanding photo feature about the commercial monster China is building itself into with its OBOR “Belt and Road Initiative” here, at The New Yorker’s website just now. This photo is a screen grab from the article. You get a few free articles a month without being a subscriber, so you can check it out.
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This Round of Iran Protests
This morning both Mary Dejevski in The Independent and Borzou Daragahi in Buzzfeed point out an apparently deep and wide cleavage between the poorer, rural Iranians leading this round of protests and the urban middle-class. Daragahi:
“The middle class in Iran are educated and experienced enough to understand who is who in this theater,” said the editor of a centrist Tehran newspaper close to the leadership,”
suggesting urban condescension for the protesting rural cadres. He writes that urbanites “derided the protesters as ‘tribal’ small-town folks; they’re burning police stations and attacking security forces, they said, not out of political considerations but to settle rural vendettas.”
Dejevsky confirms the condescension, remembering how a relative, once resident in Teheran,
“despaired of the impracticality of many of the new educated middle class, their condescension as she saw it towards their uneducated compatriots.”
Other than compiling video clips of protests, as Daraghani does on Twitter @borzou, neither seems to have a well-developed line of communication outside the urban “fast set” in Teheran.
•••••
In the last day or so the number of demonstrations appears to have dropped, but as we learned in the 2009 protests, and indeed throughout the neighboring “Arab Spring,” we’re never far from a Friday, the holy day, a day off on which things can flare up again.
I defer to both Dejevsky and Borzou, and anybody else who has actually been to Iran. The closest I’ve ever come was on this Qatar Airways flight. All I can say from first-hand experience is that southwest Iran is very dry and not very populated.
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