People might think that Wilt Chamberlain or Michael Jordan were the best basketball players of all time, and maybe they were. But here’s a little secret. Any parent whose had just a little practice can sink one from the foul line. All it requires is that you replace the basketball with a small bag containing a used diaper. Parents don’t miss. The consequences of doing so would be, well, messy.
Category: Humanity
A (Brief) Letter from Singapore
This week I find myself in one of the chief Asian powerhouses: Singapore. I visited this tiny but hugely influential country fifteen years ago, just after having read another Letter From Singapore in the New Yorker magazine. Back then, the community seemed smaller and the businesses were lots more cozier. Today, the community seems larger, and businesses are still pretty cozy.
Singapore is a nation state of paradoxes. Its small size would not lead one to believe that it is one of the chief trading centers in the region, with container ships constantly waiting to unload. That, by the way, really does seem to be one of the lone constants between now and 1993. The hotel I stayed in then, the Pan Pacific, was one of the taller buildings. Today it is in the shadow of many others.
The city itself is difficult to evaluate this week because of an extraordinary event. They are hosting their first Grand Prix on the weekend, which will be held on the streets at night. It’s a first for Formula 1 and somewhat controversial. What is not in dispute is that when F1 comes to town to do a street race, everything gets turned upside down. Tonight, returning from dinner, with many street closures in order to form the racing circuit, my taxi took me through the connected substructure of many buildings to get me back to the Mandarin Oriental. We needed a residence pass just to do that.
The hotel prices on Thursday night will increase from a seasonal norm of $300SGD to $1800SGD. This means I will be out of here on Thursday.
Singapore sports a cross of many cultures, including Chinese, Malaysian, Bengal Indian, Japanese, British, and yes, some Americans. This intersection leads to a wealth of cuisine entertainment and education options. There is a disparity amongst some of the groups, and to be sure, not everyone here is wealthy, but for a tourist it represents an interesting stop in the middle of the Pacific rim, with Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong, not far off at all, and Australia, an almost reasonable distance.
The people here are extremely gracious and the service has been nothing short of remarkable. More on Singapore in a future note.
Gustav Update
While it is too early to tell the political ramifications, it’s not too early to donate money to relief efforts. The American Red Cross has always served the world well in this regard. Here is the link.
Spinning a Hurricane
In general it is considered to be in extremely poor taste to talk about the politics of other peoples’ suffering, especially while they are suffering. And so I will do so. This week both the Democrats and Republicans have the opportunity to make hay of the trek of, and losses by many thousands of people fleeing New Orleans, again. The Republicans are in interesting position. On the one hand they can’t be seen as making hay, and so they have postponed the beginning of their national convention. Moreover, if things go wrong, like they did with Katrina, it will leave a clear impression that they cannot govern. And so things won’t go that wrong. This is also the perfect opportunity to keep President Bush and Vice President away. They’re already wildly unpopular, but it is a very difficult thing to not have the elected heads of the party speak. Gustav provided the perfect excuse.
The Democrats have fewer options. The best they can do is stay quiet, because anything else will seem like making hay. They can also hope for the storm to dissipate quickly without much damage, as can we all. Aside from the human relief that would bring, the Republicans would have lost the spotlight to a non-event. Sadly that seems unlikely.
And so in this case human suffering will serve Republicans – to a point.
McCain v. Obama: Personality and Judgment
How does one take the measure of an individual? How will a person react under stress to unpredictable circumstance? President Bush was so unengaged that he probably didn’t know when he should have been feeling more stress. He failed to oversee little things, like the war in Iraq and the economy. One actually wonders what he did in the White House all of these years. But I digress.
John McCain likes to think of himself as a straight talker. In general I think that’s true but it’s not always the case. I liked that he took his change of heart to support drilling off the coast of California to the environmental lobby and told them to their face (even though I hate the idea of drilling off the coast). Having heard him talk I like how he has handled opposition when dealing with abortion. Still, I dislike that he did in fact flip flop on drilling, and I don’t like that he refused to answer a simple question by the press, like, “How many houses do you own?”
I am also deaply saddened by McCain’s resorting to negative campaigning, in spite of his protestations to the contrary. To me, negative campaigning is the loser’s last refuge, and here it is as if someone said to McCain, “Do you want to be known as a statesman nice guy loser, or do you want to win?” And he decided he wanted to win, damn his principles.
While the practice has been executed flawlessly by Republicans, it should be noted that Democrats can play the game as well, as Senator Clinton did in the primaries. As distasteful as behaving this way in the general is, it is unforgivable in primaries, and Clinton violated what some call the Reagan Rule, named after the President who reminded members of his party who the opposition was.
Barak Obama has done very little negative campaigning. He has another quality, however, that I like. He has stated openly that he is not an idealogue. He seems to take every situation as it is presented to him and responds appropriately. This makes him perhaps a more difficult public speaker because he can’t just blat out the one liners. It makes him unpreditable at times.
His level of education wards off some of my concern about his unpredictability, and he is not inarticulate.
This leads me to believe that Obama has better judgment and the appropriate personality for the job.