One of the things that I do in addition to ruminating about ‘Europe’ is to report on the biotechnology industry in Germany and Austria. One of the tools that I use to make the job easier is Google’s News Alert service. And sometimes the service turns up surprising articles.
Tag Archives: Life
Placement
One thing that I’ve often heard in a half decade or so living and working in Europe is that Americans have no sense of place. Sometimes the idea is asserted that crudely, sometimes equally crudely in a different form: America is too young to have real history, thus Americans have no sense of history and are lacking the deep rootedness of many Europeans. Sometimes it’s a bit more subtle: A great many Americans are visibly more mobile throughout their lives than a great many Europeans. People move away for jobs, for family, for love, and often enough just for want of a change. They’re clearly not making lifelong attachments, and thus not as attached to a place.
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Unless you feel, naught will you ever gain (Faust, J.W. Goethe)
Europe is now a place where diversity is celebrated. Where it has become the cornerstone of a developing common identity. Sometimes this is hard to understand. Sometimes it is hard work. But sometimes, it just comes naturally.
The Kettle Called Conrad Black
Slate has a delightful piece on the board of Black’s company, Hollinger International. It seems the directors, such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle, had little serious business experience and basically rubber-stamped Black’s plans.
Daniel Gross writes, “Most of these more or less honorable folks were basically idle directors. They showed up at meetings, ate lunch, rubber-stamped corporate plans, and cashed their checks.”
And the business types weren’t necessarily top notch either: “But Black seemed to have a genius for recruiting CEOs with legal issues, as Steven Pearlstein noted in Wednesday’s Washington Post. A. Alfred Taubman, the former CEO of Sotheby’s, remained on Hollinger’s board even after he had been convicted of violating antitrust laws. Dwayne Andreas, the paterfamilias of Archer Daniels Midland, the agri-business giant that in 1996 pleaded guilty to price-fixing, was also a longtime board director.”
“Given this cast of characters, it should come as no surprise that over the years the stock of Hollinger International has failed to keep pace with the broad market indexes and many of its peer media companies. After all, putting a bunch of right-wingers with occasionally dubious foreign policy credentials in the position of directing a profit-making business seems almost as illogical as putting a bunch of right-wingers with occasionally dubious business credentials in charge of foreign policy.”
Zing!
The World in 1856
A few months ago I came across an old book that my grandmother had been left by her grandmother. Called ‘Geography for Children On A Perfectly Easy Plan’ it dates from 1856 (first printed 1848) and is a British geography school textbook, educating children on each country in the world, its inhabitants and its economy. What follows is presumably therefore how British schoolchildren viewed Europe and Europeans in the mid-19th century. It bares a remarkable similarity how the British tabloid press views Europe and Europeans today.
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Sometimes, the bad get their comeuppance
Conrad Black – quite possibly the worst newspaper owner in the history of Canada – has agreed to resign from his chairmanship at Hollinger International, essentially ending his career as a political figure and opinion-maker. Hollinger, the owner of the Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post, used to own a number of Canadian newspapers, including the fishwrap known as the National Post.
As an unending source of American right-wing propaganda abroad, Black had a reputation as a blowhard who was largely out of step with the actual residents of the places he published newspaper. Mark Shainblum, author of the Canadian political comic Angloman, one portrayed him as one of the triumvirate ruling Torontorg, a parody of the Star Trek aliens the “Borg”, along with his wife Barbara “feminism is totalitarianism” Amiel. “Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.”
Conrad Black, a British-Canadian dual citizen prevented temporarily from receiving royal honours by his nemisis Jean Chrétien, has been forced to resign because of his involvement in US$32 of “informal” executive pay outside of the knowledge of Hollingers’ audit committee.
He is survived by his creation, the Hollinger Group. Hollinger, once owner of much of Canada’s print media, suffered a debilitating crisis in 2001 which saw the loss of Black’s personal project – Canada’s National Post and the bulk of the newspaper group’s assets. Hollinger stock is up 18% on news of his departure.
Beware of Greeks bearing scripts
According to today’s Guardian, a recently rediscovered (and to some degree reconstructed) Aeschylus play about the Trojan War is to be performed by the Cypriot national theatre company.
Aeschylus’ take on the Trojan War took the form of a trilogy of dramas of which only Agamemnon was thought to have survived. Out of 90-some plays Aeschylus is thought to have written, only seven survived into the modern age. Most of the texts were lost in the torching of the Library at Alexandria. However, apparently partial copies of this play, Achilles, were retrieved from a mummy’s coffin in Egypt. It seems that mummies were frequently packed in loose paper and somebody used a copy of the play with their dearly departed.
I would think this to be the longest period between performances of a play in theatre history.
The whole thing brings to mind the image of some future archeologist rediscovering the lost works of L. Ron Hubbard by digging through boxes of unwanted Christmas presents, but that’s just me…
The Strange Case of Odysseas Tsenai
In the news today the Comission and Spain/Poland are still haggling over the price of the constitution. Meantime from another pole of Europe, a curious story of one young Albanian, and the struggle to assert his elementary rights in his new homeland: Greece. My feeling is that in our current preoccupations, our conception of Europe lies too far to the North and too far to the West. I also think, that when we come to look at the contribution and participation of immigrants in Europe, we all too often forget the adversity they face.
Background: in 1990 the Greek Alabania border opened. Over the mountains and across the sea the Albanians started arriving in Greece. Their numbers were large but never counted: their number still constitutes material for scare stories on popular Greek TV. The actual number is unknown but it might be as high as a million all over Greece (if you include the ethnic Greek Albanians ). The first arrivals came from a country whose isolation was proverbial. They were destitute, blinded by the city lights and the consumer goods, and clueless as to what they could do to earn a living.
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If You’re Surprised By This You Shouldn’t Be
Really, much as I would like to see a marked and rapid improvement in the democratic climate in Iraq, forgive me if I can’t help considering most of the discussion about the possibilitiesof this occuring in the near future a bit like a contemporary revamp of ‘innocents abroad’. At the end of the day all these endless ‘corruption indexes’ that you see published from time to time in the press do actually mean something. Having lived in a society that was relatively less corrupt (the UK) and one that is relatively more (Spain), I do get to note some important differences. One of these relates to the social standing of politicians.
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