Month: November 2011

“When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats:

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

 

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

  And loved your beauty with love false or true;

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

 

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

  Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

  And paced upon the mountains overhead,

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Friday’s demonstration in Tahrir Square, which we discussed here, seems to have energized the protest movement for real democracy in Egypt. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) decided to respond with violence today, injuring at least 81. Jack Shenker gives a primer:

Trouble began after riot police moved to disperse tents that had been set up in Tahrir Square following a large rally on Friday calling on Egypt‘s ruling generals to return the country to civilian rule. Following hours of scuffles, protesters succeeded in driving the central security forces (CSF) from the square and captured one of their trucks in the process. Crowds jumped up and down on the vehicle chanting “the interior ministry are thugs” and calling for the downfall of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the country’s de facto leader since the toppling of former president Hosni Mubarak in February.

By mid-afternoon, armed police had returned to Tahrir square in far greater numbers, launching volleys of teargas, rubber bullets and ‘birdshot’ pellet cartridges into the crowd, often from armoured vehicles. Eyewitnesses claimed they were targeted at head height, and ambulances ferried away several protesters suffering from serious head wounds. As darkness fell both the police and the protesters saw their ranks swell in number, with the unrest spilling down side streets and along several of downtown Cairo’s most important thoroughfares.

AJE and Enduring America are live-blogging developments and collecting images from the protests. Amira al-Hussaini rounds up reax from the Egyptian twittersphere, which you can follow using the #Egypt and #Tahrir hashtags. Daniel Serwer flags a seemingly prescient argument from Marina Ottaway that the SCAF is simply the Mubarak regime without Mubarak. Juan Cole and Issandr El Amrani think through the relationship between the SCAF and the two main opposition movements, the liberal and Islamist blocs. This picture, via Sharif Kouddous, gives a sense of the scale of the protest:

Here’s video from Tahrir today showing continued demonstrations:

There’s also some evidence that the violence has spread from Cairo to Alexandria and Suez. This video documents a field hospital set up by protestors in Tahrir to help address the wounded (though more doctors are apparently needed):

And this man taunts the SCAF by dancing through a cloud of tear gas:

Freedom is never earned once. It is earned every day. The Dish stands with the people of Egypt, and their struggle, and their future.

Rich Juzwiak recently judged a children's beauty pageant. At his personal blog Juzwiak expands on his experience:

I was going to have a problem with the "facial beauty" score. I'd come with my own agenda: To compensate for the world's cruelty as much as possible (giving overweight girls, for example, an advantage just for having the confidence to challenge the standard of beauty) and be as vigilant against overbearing parents as my position would allow (taking off points for children whose routines could not be performed if their parents weren't leading from the behind the judges' tables).

For some reason, I thought I'd pull this off no problem because there'd be a more vague set of qualifications, perhaps a general 1 to 10 to be rewarded per category or something. I did not expect to be faced first and foremost with the specific question of how pretty a child's face is. How pretty is any child's face? In a state of constant flux, the child's face might as well be a blur. And no matter how pretty it is, it will change in a year, six months, two months. How does one even start making that kind of a call?

TDW captions:

Colin Read and crew head underground to break nearly every rule in the NYC Transit rule book…

Rhett Allain continues his series and hones in on the yellow bird:

When I first started playing Angry Birds oh so many years ago, I had this feeling that after tapping the screen the yellow bird just went at a constant velocity. Then one day, I accidentally shot it super high. The bird didn’t just keep going up, it looked like some parabolic motion. … It appears that when you tap the angry yellow bird, two things can happen. First, it increases its speed to 30 m/s (in the same direction that it was going). Second, if its velocity is greater than 20°; below the horizontal the vertical acceleration will be lower than 9.8 m/s².

Ricky Gervais appraises the differences between British and American humor:

It’s often dangerous to generalize, but under threat, I would say that Americans are more “down the line.” They don’t hide their hopes and fears. They applaud ambition and openly reward success. Brits are more comfortable with life’s losers. … Americans say, “have a nice day” whether they mean it or not. Brits are terrified to say this. We tell ourselves it’s because we don’t want to sound insincere but I think it might be for the opposite reason. We don’t want to celebrate anything too soon. Failure and disappointment lurk around every corner.

(Video: Liam Neeson fails at comedy in a clip from Gervais' new show "Life's Too Short")

A cuddly furry alternative – and not Aaron.

In reviewing Colson Whitehead's new novel, Alix Ohlin tackles our pop-culture monsters:

We live in an era of rampant overpopulation, ever-increasing consumption, and limited resources, and our monster of choice, today, is the zombie. … Zombies aren’t space invaders or giant insects; they’re not “others” in the way most monsters are. They’re human victims, really, who can’t control what they do.

On a related note, Alyssa Rosenberg reviews W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America:

The Puritans’ commitment to destroying monsters didn’t stop at self-control: Cotton Mather and others were all too eager to visit bodily destruction on the people who they believed had become monstrous in the country they’d come to subdue. … But there’s no question that America is very good at mobilizing swiftly to absolutely destroy the kinds of things we’ve decided are monstrous, whether they’re New England sea serpents or al Qaeda.

This is America, folks:

Whatever it is on the campus at UC Davis, it is not a democracy. It's a police state. For helmeted cops to be openly pepper-spraying unarmed peacefully demonstrating students at a fucking campus is not American. The over-reaction, the lack of professionalism, the random sadism of this boggles the mind. The chancellor of the university, Linda P.B. Katehi, who invited these goons to break up Occupy Davis on the grounds of a campus those students and their parents pay for, has some explaining to do. Here's her comment so far:

"We deeply regret that many of the protestors today chose not to work with our campus staff and police to remove the encampment as requested. We are even more saddened by the events that subsequently transpired to facilitate their removal."

Notice the weasel words: "events that subsequently transpired". Notice how no one is actually responsible for these "events transpiring." These kids are harming no-one and exercising a core First Amendment right. The only response to this, to my mind, is to return to that spot in massive numbers and maintain a rigorous nonviolence in defense not just of their cause, but of the First Amendment itself: a sit-in, in other words, in defense of the First Amendment. A related protest Occupy Davis has had no such problems. From one of their members:

At Occupy Davis, relations with the democratically elected city council and local police forces have been genial and productive. The authorities have worked continuously to harmonize the occupation's presence with the park and surrounding businesses and ensure that all aspects of the encampment remain non-violent. Those in charge of using force are aware that they are democratically elected officials that are directly accountable to the people.

Occupy UC Davis, a mere three blocks away, is under the jurisdiction of an undemocratic, appointed regime of force over which its subjects have no meaningful democratic control. The authorities there attacked non-violent protesters with indifference, and, in some cases, a clear display of sadistic pleasure.

There could be no better illustration of the differences between a democratic, accountable public safety effort and a fascist, totalitarian, unaccountable police state. The students of UC Davis have no meaningful voice, and that is reflected at the very top of the administration down to the officer on the ground who can spice up his day with a confident sense of utter, unassailable impunity.

You can forgive, but hold accountable, officers who make mistakes in the heat of the moment. But taking glee in spraying pepper spray in the faces of unarmed students is an ugly, ugly event.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.