Scott Nelson/World Picture News, for The New York Times
The first is a long piece, by New York Times reporters Walt Bodganich and Jenny Nordberg on the US's role in the current turmoil in Haiti. "Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos" lays out clearly what I and others have been saying all along, and belies its wishy-washy title; the International Republican Institute, a Warrantless Wiretapper-affiliated outfit that had championed the overthrow of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela played an active role in the intransigence of the opposition and in democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's ouster. It's beyond disheartening, but offers clear parallels to the debacle in Iraq. Read it while it's still online.
The second, by AP writer Rita Beamish was on Yahoo! News. It's title is "Religious Groups Get Chunk of AIDS Money." It was a more disturbing read than I imagined. (As Keguro points out in the comments section, there's a corollary article on American missionaries in Africa on yesterday's New York Times Magazine, by Daniel Bergner, called simply "The Call." I read about two paragraphs and put it down, but I'll read it through either tonight or tomorrow. Kai in NYC responds that the New York Review of Books featured a number of articles on the AIDS pandemic in Africa, a number of which I read and highly recommend. Here are a few: Helen Epstein's 2000 article on "The Mystery of AIDS in Africa"; Helen Epstein and Lincoln Chin's 2002 piece, "Can AIDS Be Stopped?"; Keith Hansen's and Nancy Scheper-Hughes's response and Epstein's response, in 2003, to an Epstein article, "AIDS in South Africa: The Invisible Cure"; and Helen Epstein's 2005 piece, "The Lost Children of AIDS.")
Check both out. Thoughts?
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And for something completely different, Ego, how huge can you grow? Mr. Champion of the World himself, Kanye West. Don't hate the playa, hate the...well, you know. (Thanks, Byron, for the link!)
Photograph by David LaChapelle
Keguro, I'd sound a lot more coherent with the article here in from of me (in the New York Review of Books, concerning AIDS organizations in Africa) but, as it plays out in practice, there are some serious problems with your formulation. I can't recall the exact country (Uganda?) but they'd recently established an enormously successful condom proganda campaign, and were seeing AIDS infection rates plummmet, when (Washington based) funding switched from direct to the government and other secular organizations to (to the most backward minded of) Christian organizations. The Christian groups of course ceased the condom campaign and had only one message: abstinence! What's the opposite of plummeting--rocketing? Infection rates are now rocketing.
ReplyDeleteI was hearing something recently, too, about using traditional notions of the importance of premarital virginity in South Africa to curb infection rates. My take on the debacle this approach apparently became lies in my belief that invoking traditional notions of women's roles (and sex/sexuality roles in general) are never going to defeat these intransigent, latterday problems. I think there needs to be a sharp cutting of the dross (and likewise right here in the US with our theology-based sex education and public policy) and a collective evolution into thinking and policies that actually work, not that satisfy our parochial prejudices, before we'll see the back of the AIDS epidemic.
Let me dig out those articles and re-read them ...
Kai in NYC