Found in my electronic chapbook.
“Books go unwritten because the writer is afraid of failing. She is afraid of disappointing herself, wasting her time and looking like an idiot.” p. 103
From Living The Writer’s Life: by Eric Maisel.
In the two years since I began writing about Myanmar I’ve posted more than 700 pieces, but I’ve never taken the time to get to know the men that I’ve referred to as The Generals and the Illegitimate Leaders of Myanmar among other monikers. Time’s Andrew Marshall has taken the time in a feature and several sidebars.
In the second paragraph Anderson asks the question:
[H]ow well do we really know the junta? “We don’t understand it very well at all, although it’s not very easy to understand,” says Donald M. Seekins, a Burma scholar at Meio University in Okinawa, Japan. Trying to fathom the regime’s worldview doesn’t mean we condone its human-rights abuses; many believe that ongoing atrocities by the Burmese military constitute war crimes. But policies based on a flawed understanding of Than Shwe and his men will be ineffective or even counterproductive, warn Burma experts.
In reading the package I fault Anderson on only one, journalistic, point: his lede:
Among Manchester United Football Club’s 300 million or so supporters worldwide are two Burmese men whose love of the game spans generations. One is a stout, bespectacled, betel nut – chewing septuagenarian, the other his favorite teenage grandson, and like many of their soccer-mad compatriots they stay up late into Burma’s tropical nights to watch live broadcasts from faraway England. So far, so normal. But knowing the grandfather in this touching scene is Senior General Than Shwe, the xenophobic chief of Burma’s junta, makes it seem all wrong. Rabidly anti-Western, yet pro – Wayne Rooney, is this the tyrant we know and hate?
I don’t care that Than Shwe is a football fan. It doesn’t inform me about his character any more than knowing that Adolf Hitler was an artist gives me any insight into his Third Reich. I get that truly evil men can be good grandfathers. But knowing, or not knowing, that does not change what I know about evil.
This passage from the article, however tells me a great deal:
So [Felix] has joined other disillusioned university graduates among the KIA ranks. “Some people say we must have dialogue with the SPDC,” he says, referring to the junta by its Orwellian-sounding moniker, the State Peace and Development Council.
In two years I haven’t seen the name State Peace and Development Council before. The name is much more powerful than the banal junta.
I’m going to be using it, a lot.
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun?
Dan Moulthrop, his frustration with astroturfing callers notwithstanding, did an excellent job this week of getting Issue 2 on the table. While proponents of the issue would like us to believe that they’re all about bucolic family farms where the Ferdinand, Wilbur and Henny Penny live out they’re idyllic lives under the benevolent eye of Farmer Jones and his sweet wife, the truth is that the factory meat producers (I can’t really call them farmers, see above) want to protect their profits from the big bad Humane Society.
Found in my electronic chapbook.
“Mere mortals may want to avoid failure, but gods and writers accept that failure is their log all too frequently.” p. 102
From Living The Writer’s Life: by Eric Maisel.
Two stories caught my attention this evening and I have to wonder if India’s arms continuing arms sales to Myanmar and the growing border conflict between Myanmar and Bangladesh are at all related. Throw in China, and there’s a mess brewing. If I lived in Bangladesh, I’d be very nervous right now.
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either against us or for us. There is no middle ground here.
Found in my electronic chapbook.
“Honoring the writing process means stumbling but getting up, writing whole miserable books, throwing out ideas and beautiful lines that do not fit, nursing depressions and surviving depressions, living through good manias and bad manias, getting one”s work insulted (today I received an edited manuscript whose margins were peppered with “lame!”s and “flabby!”s). and a thousand other things which are inevitable parts of the process.” p. 101
From Living The Writer’s Life: by Eric Maisel.
Aung San Suu Kyi is talking more, this time with Western diplomats and with the blessing of the ruling generals of Myanmar. While everyone aknowledges that a softening or even lifing of economic sanctions is the focus of the talks, no one is speculating on what the generals might be willing to offer in exchange.
From the BBC:
The Rangoon talks focused on the long-standing Western sanctions.
Ms Suu Kyi met the UK ambassador and the deputy heads of the Australian and US missions for talks lasting an hour at a state guesthouse.
I get the bit about how sanctions hurt the people more than they do those in power because, well, they’re in power and unless you can drive the people through deprivations to actually revolt, the sanctions don’t accomplish as much as we would all like to think they should.
British ambassador Andrew Heyn said the meeting was a “fact-finding mission” by Ms Suu Kyi.
“Her objective is to try to get a clear picture of sanctions – what sanctions are and the impact of sanctions,” the ambassador said after the meeting.
She seemed “very healthy and very engaged,” he said.
Friday’s meeting was the latest in a series of carefully choreographed talks that may represent the start of a new approach, says the BBC’s South East Asia correspondent, Rachel Harvey.
If Suu Kyi does make the case for partially lifting or otherwise modifying sanctions, what does she get in return? What would the generals risk in exchange for a change in sanctions?
I have a sense that Afghanistan is a generational issue, a divide between those of us born before 1965 or there abouts, and those before after; those who have a memory of the Vietnam War, and those who only know that time as History.
One of the points that Tim Russo and I have differed on in the past has been whether or not President Barack Hussein Obama can succeed there, in some sense, where no foreign nation has ever succeeded before. Even with the Nobel Peace Prize on his wall, I fear that Afghanistan is a bridge too far for Obama.
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure right from Day One that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn’t about me.
Found in my electronic chapbook.
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett. p. 101
From Living The Writer’s Life: by Eric Maisel.
As the United States has turned its overt attentions to Myanmar, and President Barack Hussein Obama has announced a visit to the region to speak with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations leaders next month, the ruling generals seem intent upon twisting the dials of first China and now Bangladesh, its neighbors.
From The Daily Star:
Bangladesh has reinforced its troops along the border with Myanmar as tension went high following repeated provocative acts by the latter’s military forces including violation of international border and illegal construction of barbed-wire fences along the frontier.
Highly-placed sources in the government said the reinforcement was required as the Myanmar military junta deployed huge troops with heavy weapons within five kilometres of the border and many of them frequently intruded into Bangladesh territory, added the sources.
Bangladesh in the past always resolved all disputes with its neighbours through bilateral discussion but this time the authorities had taken it seriously and they are taking steps accordingly, said the sources.
What are the generals thinking?
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