Once upon a time, in a gentler age, the International Herald Tribune published its late sports editor Dick Roraback’s ode to baseball’s opening day each year.
Under the fold, a little bit of nostalgia, The Crack of the Bat:
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Author Archives: Doug Merrill
U Can Be the President
With sagans of words being written and broadcast about the death of John Paul II, there’s not too much to add. So here’s just a little.
Was he the last European Pope?
Brazil has 137.5 million Catholics, Mexico 89 million, the Philippines 61 million and the United States 58 million. The Europe appears with 55 million in Italy. The Catholic hierarchy is, famously, not a democracy, but the laity’s center of gravity is firmly in the New World, and its fastest growth is coming in Africa and Asia. Europe doesn’t much figure.
Josh Marshall succinctly describes why so many are even writing about this latest Bishop of Rome, and what the office looked like before Karol Wojtyla took it up:
[B]efore John Paul II, the Pope was a much more, well ? parochial figure than he has been in the decades since.
The Pope didn?t travel around the world. He was always an Italian. And he was far less involved in the ecumenical work that played such a role in John Paul?s pontificate.
The job is clearly different now, and John Paul II made it so.
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A Little Less Magical
I’m not sure what possessed the editors of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung to add Somerset Maugham’s The Magician to their list of 50 great novels of the twentieth century. In the preface to the edition that I have, the author admits that when it was republished, he had not read the book in nearly fifty years. “I had completely forgotten it,” he writes.
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Now What?
The German newspaper whose web site really could be better organized has a pretty good run-down on the latest from Schleswig-Holstein, which seems set on proving Palmerston’s adage for the 21st century.
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Another Question
Apparently, lifting the embargo on selling arms to China is high on the agenda for the meeting of the EU foreign ministers next week.
The reasonably senior US diplomat said he wondered what the EU would be getting if it chose to lift the embargo now. Is there more than just contracts involved? Or are the sales enough?
Along with all of the major German parties, I’m finding this a peculiar time to lift an embargo, given the law that China just passed.
The Wolfowitz Bank
Everybody ready for neo-con development politics?
President Bush said today he is nominating Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz to be the next president of the World Bank, tapping one of his administration’s most controversial figures as the U.S. choice to head the 184-nation institution.
Because, y’know, after engineering a military quagmire in Asia, Robert McNamara was such a smashing success at the World Bank…
Or will it be a Koch-Weser moment?
UPDATE: Bloomberg comes through with a bit of the agenda.
Under Wolfowitz, the Bush administration may now try to narrow the focus of the World Bank, returning the international lending institution to its roots of primarily financing large infrastructure projects and limiting the practice of handing out zero-interest loans, analysts such as Alan Meltzer, who led a 2000 congressional inquiry into the World Bank, said.
Tapped also has scuttlebutt from 17th & H; in short, Wolfowitz will be hated by the institution he is slated to run.
On Monday, I was in the audience when a reasonably senior US diplomat speculated on improvements in US-European relations. I thought to myself, well, things will get a hell of a lot better on Jan. 21, 2009.
Small Public Service Announcement
Over at a different web site, I’ve just read another usage of “a perfect storm,” and my teeth ground. Sebastian Junger’s book of the same name is a terrific book, a moving story carefully reported and well told. But the title has become a cliche. I hereby resolve never to use it at Fistful of Euros.
Likewise, the post below will be my last reference to the curious incident of the dog that did not bark in the night.
As far as I can remember, I have never written anything like “Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus.” I pledge that I never will.
If you care to add to my (perhaps our) list of banned cliches, please do not hesitate to leave a comment.
Silly German Regulations, Part 439
Business Week‘s Frankfurt bureau chief decided to get a German driver’s license after a mere 11 years in the country.
How Germany Can Drive You Crazy
I’ve had a New York motorist’s license for 30 years. So why did I need to endure months of driver’s ed again and a tortuous bureaucracy?Not long after I began driving lessons, my instructor had a revelation. “You can already drive,” he said, exhaling the smoke of yet another cigarette as we puttered along in a Volkswagen Golf equipped with an extra brake on the passenger side. No kidding, I thought. I’ve had a U.S. driver’s license for more than 30 years.
So why, 11 years after moving to Germany, was I starting the same driver’s training program as a German teenager, one that involves 40-plus hours of car and classroom instruction and costs $1,200? The answer reveals one of the less attractive aspects of German society. Not the side that’s fun-loving and generous, but the side that’s pathologically risk-averse and mindlessly bureaucratic, bent on making everything — putting up a building, starting a new business, buying a house — so difficult that nothing happens. It’s one of the small ways the nation sabotages its own economy.
Indeed. (Are other EU countries this ridiculous?)
Echelon Back Story
The British edition of Body of Secrets, James Bamford’s second book about the US National Security Agency, gives equal billing to Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the subtitle, but that’s just marketing, making the home audience feel good. The same subtitle also alludes to Echelon, an eavesdropping program that was on its way to being notorious, particularly in Internet circles, when the book was first published in 2001.
Both get their due, of course, but the book is really a history of the NSA, the agency that does the lion’s share of America’s electronic intercepts, cryptology, cryptanalysis, signals intelligence and so forth.
I haven’t finished the book, but there’s a lot in it. Factually, it’s dense, with very precise details that show how thoroughly Bamford had done his homework.
Lessons abound. First, how little is new in the fraught world of spying and democratic decision-making. Korea and the early Cold War period produced examples of leaders who did not want to hear what people on the ground were reporting. Resources were allocated to the wrong places; the country was caught flat-footed by events that shouldn’t have been unexpected; there was a critical shortage of personnel who could speak crucial languages. In the early 1950s, it was Korean; half a century later it’s Urdu or Pashtu or various branches of Arabic.
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If On a Winter’s Night a Publisher
Brings forth the fiftieth and last of its great novels of the twentieth century, a resolutely head-spinning inquisition of a book by Italo Calvino, one that keeps introducing a novel titled If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. In this, the coldest week in Munich in twenty years, the series not only takes notice of the weather, it refuses to end, spiraling instead into this ouroboros of a book.
Over the last four weeks, the editors have toyed with the readers and the season, jumping from Peter Hoeg’s tale of Greenlanders in Denmark, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, to the hothouse of colonial Vietnam in Margeurite Duras’ slender, tender The Lover, and now, of course, to Calvino’s winter night.
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