Bill Murray's Blog, page 97

Cats

Big cats on the Mara North Conservancy, Kenya, December 2016: Serval, leopards, baby lion, hippo kill and cheetah family with a fresh gazelle kill. The leopard pair are mating.

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

Sunsets

A couple of days back with faster internet. Here are a few sunrises and sunsets in the Mara North Conservancy, December, 2016. Eland, wildebeest, cheetah.

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

Who? Me?

[image error]

Just another day in the Mara North Conservancy, Kenya.

Kenya

Second full day in Kicheche Mara camp and we’re spending eight or nine hours a day on drives. Little time to look at photos yet, but they’ll come.

Far and Wide

Places perpendicularly opposed: As we leave for the equator this week, with posts from Kenya to follow, I’m working to put to bed my new book, Out in the Cold, about adventure travels in and around the Arctic. Hope to have it published in February, only four or five months late. Not bad for an author. I’ll run a few excerpts here next month. Here’s the cover:

[image error]

Unease

The country is at loggerheads. I imagine the way I feel tonight may be the way some felt about the incoming Obama administration.

I’m on the way out of town. We have the pure honor and privilege to be able to spend the next couple of weeks immersed in African wildlife. I’ll post here as opportunities allow. I can’t help but observe, though, that we leave a most unsettled America.

To ponder:

The neoliberal economic model, unsteady since the 2008 crisis, is under attack at all the ideological fringes, fraying at the edges. What will be the impact of a tycoon-president determined to commingle his business interests with the exercise of power?
What is to become of the existing western defense structures? I fear especially for the brave but tiny Baltic states. Then there is the incoming administration’s unsteady start with China.
In light of the incoming president’s apparent appointments, what’s really up with the Trump/Russia relationship?
Come on, now. About this incoming Trump cabinet, consider:


An education secretary who wishes to privatize education
A labor secretary opposed to the minimum wage
A national security advisor who joined in a chant to “lock her up” at the Republican convention
An environmental protection head who is suing the agency he will be nominated to lead
An Attorney General who was denied a judgeship
A health secretary who apparently wishes  to privatize Medicare
A UN representative with no international experience beyond trade missions as a governor
A housing secretary, a surgeon, with no managerial experience
A transportation secretary who is married to the Senate majority leader
A Small Business Administration head who is a wrestling promoter
Apparently, John Bolton

One or two of these, okay, sure. But collectively?

Now, you may make the “he won, he has a right to assemble his own people” argument. Or the “he’s a small government Republican (if you say so) and these people will advance that agenda” argument. I agree with the former. We can argue about the latter.

But really, are intelligence briefings too inconvenient for a president-elect to be troubled with? Really really? And does a president-elect really need to get publicly prickly against a local union leader in Indiana?

Back over the summer, as we left to visit Greenland, I wrote that I was happy to leave the dismal Trump/Clinton campaign behind, if only for a couple of weeks. For the next couple of weeks I’ll leave the transition with you, but this time I’m uneasy. Things don’t feel right.

If you feel I’m wrong, or wish to quibble on the particulars, please do. We can discuss with civility and respect. Let’s engage.

Meanwhile, for me, it’s onward and upward, for a brief two weeks, to Africa. The law of the jungle (in this case, the savanna), is way more uplifting.

 

 

EarthPhotos.com Facelift

As you may know, we’ve got a little collection going, comprised of our travel photos – about 20,000 of them – on the web site EarthPhotos.com. If you haven’t browsed over there lately, please drop by and see the changes we’ve made to freshen it up a little bit. And if you find anything out of place, please let me know.

Thanks to Jerry at JR Customization for the help!

Be Careful What You Vote For

Today the center-right French Republicans have chosen the harder right of the two candidates to offer up to contest Marine Le Pen, if you assume as I do that the chances of the left to make it to a runoff next April are vanishingly small. François Fillon is an earthquake, I think, for socialisty France, in that their center right has chosen its most supply-side, trickle down candidate as their country’s best hope against the Le Pen scourge.

I’d say, with Brexit, Trump and Fillon, we see a trend. Three longish articles for you, first on next weekend’s Italian referendum, in which polls indicate a lurch toward populism.

After that, in March it’s the Netherlands’ turn.

And finally, it may not be too bold a prediction that by next autumn, Angela Merkel’s time may be past. You heard it here first.

The face of the western democracies this time next year is taking shape and I’m not sure how well we’ll get through it.

On Trump, and Where We Are Now

It’s hard to see what’s out there.

We live in a most pregnant moment. Outside cosseted liberal circles (where I live), one may not become unpregnant. Change will come.

There is a Great Blue Rush to understand the white working class.

A hero of the moment is J D Vance, whose Hillbilly Elegy is all the rage just now. Having lived in Appalachia for fifteen years (the very buckle of the bible belt, we like to say), I caution against taking Mr. Vance too seriously. As soon as I picked up his book, it struck me as lacking in empathy for the people he describes.

Vance is mean. He castigates his kin and their fellows, and he ascribes their predicament to flaws in their own character.

In fact, the largest single cause of underperformance around here is that all of the jobs in this part of the world have left this part of the world. Until not long ago there was a garment factory near our home. Now there are none, save for chicken processing plants largely employing immigrant labor. High school kids can’t wait to graduate and get the hell out of here. Methamphetamine is the local plague.

Rather than Vance, to get yourself thinking I recommend on the left, Roy Greenslade’s Is liberalism really to blame for Britain’s (and America’s) ills? and on the right, Joan C Williams’s What so many people don’t get about the US working class. It is not impossible to understand that white working class men (this is Williams) “aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50.”

It’s honor. And dignity.

After the election I watched PBS pundits answer “guilty as charged” to dissing that dignity in using the shorthand “non-college educated voters.” I would add “fly over country” and, as Sherrod Brown pointed out, “rust belt” to the slurs that surely stuck in the collective craw of the Trump electorate.

So we are off on our period of Blue Guilt. In the rush of excitement to embrace globalization, Blue World has been called out. While those of us not left behind celebrate the hundreds of millions of people lifted from poverty – China, Bangladesh, Pakistan – we stand naked and guilty as charged of overlooking our own countrymen, our neighbors.

Does anyone listen to globalization’s poster boy, Tom Friedman, anymore? If so, why?

And yet: While we may be suffering from a patch of Blue Guilt, it is not emollient to embrace the entire suite of Red Resentments, particularly the unwelcome antagonism toward the very Latin American migrants who do the essential, grinding work of our country, and do it willingly, even gratefully.

Hand in unfortunate hand with the fear and resentment of that particular “other” elides the fear of Islam, because of its perceived threat of terror. Whatever your politics, it is hard to avoid that at least since the overthrow of Saddam, the United States has had a large(r than Trump’s) hand in the disruption of the Islamic neighborhood. We dodge responsibility, but we should not.

So many innocent shattered lives, in the name of humanity, deserve safe harbor. Up until now our decent and welcoming land, a land of immigrants, would have been expected to understand, and lend a hand.

Apparently no more, because now is the time of Trump.

It may be, as Mr. Greenslade suggests, that painstaking education (ever the tiresome, long term corrective, ever with the lefty whiff of condescension) is the long term answer. This election has shown that the body politic is no longer willing to wait.

In a revolution, you have to know who you can trust. Half the country trusts, half the country doesn’t, both ways.

In the tumult of lefty thought there is no guidance. Some want to close ranks, for the good of the country. Others demand that Trump fail, and fast. For the good of the country.

We know our country must heal. And we wait, on knife’s edge.

The New Populism

The world has been waiting for Donald Trump since 9 November, 1989. It’s not often we can calculate the end of a political era to the exact day, but the breach of the Berlin Wall on that date set off a dénouement to the Cold War, a 776 day countdown to the final dissolution of the authoritarian model represented by the Soviet Union.

The ensuing interregnum had its own name, the Post Cold War period, highlighted but not defined by the 9/11 attacks. Its defining events were the Yugoslav wars, the GWOT and the continued strong dominance of neo-liberalism in the United States, which many believe led to the other defining event of the period, the 2008 financial crisis.

During the Post Cold War period political scientists grew impatient for the world to get on with things, to get past this pause in history. Now the new era is well and truly here; out with the old, a half century’s balance of power between representative government and authoritarianism, in with the new populism.

Few get to watch an inchoate new era take form, and that is our great good fortune. I look forward to reading future writing about the underlying dynamics that set this unnamed new era in motion. It will earn its own name in due time, but whatever we call it, who on earth would have thought one of its founding fathers would be Donald Trump?

•••••

Berlin Wall photo from EarthPhotos.com. Other photo from Wikimedia Commons.