Obsidian Wings

Unfair To Trains

by hilzoy

Since, as I'm sure you will all be astonished to learn, I am not one of Don Imus' regular listeners, I didn't hear about his unbelievably offensive remarks until today. For those of you who are even more out of it than I am, here they are, in all their glory:

"IMUS: That's some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and --

McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.

IMUS: That's some nappy-headed hos there. I'm gonna tell you that now, man, that's some -- woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like -- kinda like -- I don't know.

McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.

IMUS: Yeah.

McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes -- that movie that he had."

I wasn't going to write about this -- I mean, honestly, what is there to say? -- until I started reading various responses. For starters, there's this, from Howard Fineman, Newsweek's chief political correspondent:

"You know, the form of humor that you do here is risky, and sometimes it runs off the rails. Most of the people who listen to this show get the joke most of the time, and sometimes, you know, as David Carr said in The New York Times this morning, sometimes you go over the line so far you can't even see the line. And that's what happened in this case."

Curiously, Tom Oliphant used the same metaphor to describe Imus' remarks:

"But even I could see the beginning of what appeared to me to be a riff. And the train went off the tracks, which, you know, can happen to anybody. And, of course, what counts when the train goes off the tracks is what you then do."

The train went off the track? I don't think so. Consider what happens when an actual train derails. There you are, driving it. You approach a curve. Gauging the right speed to take it at is always a bit tricky. This time, you get it wrong, and -- oh my God -- the train goes off the tracks.

Is this in any way analogous to Imus' comments? No. For one thing, he is not piloting a difficult piece of heavy machinery. He is piloting his mouth, which, as an adult, he is expected to be in full control of. For another, there is no perfectly good conversational curve that, if misjudged, might lead normal, decent people to go off the rails in this way. It's not as though decent people might start out discussing real estate or the weather, get things slightly wrong, and suddenly, to their horror, find themselves describing hard-working and successful female basketball players as 'nappy-headed hos'. That just doesn't happen.

I mean: can any of you imagine some situation in which you could find yourself using the phrase 'nappy-headed hos'? I tried, and the closest I got was imagining that I was participating in some free lice-checking program for prostitutes. Having once had to comb all the nits out of my own hair, I can imagine that the kinkiness of someone's hair might suddenly become a lot more salient than it normally is. But even then I don't think I'd use the term 'hos', or even 'whores'. And, needless to say, Imus wasn't in any such situation. He was not doing their hair. And they were not prostitutes. They were members of a basketball team who had made the NCAA title game for the first time ever, and who had done precisely nothing to bring this on, other than being black and female. Which, apparently, is enough to make the train that is Don Imus derail. And that, of course is the problem.

Here's an excerpt from their coach's statement:

"Throughout the year, these gifted young ladies set an example for the nation that through hard work and perseverance, you can accomplish anything if you believe. Without a doubt, this past season was my most rewarding in 36 years of coaching. This young team fought through immeasurable odds to reach the highest pinnacle and play for the school's first national championship in a major sport.

To serve as a joke of Mr. Imus in such an insensitive manner creates a wedge and makes light of the efforts of these classy individuals, both as women and as women of color."

It was probably one of the biggest days of their lives, and he dragged them through the dirt. Thanks to Don Imus, most people will remember this team not as the team that took Rutgers to the championship, but as the team Don Imus called nappy-headed hos.

That's a terrible thing to do. It has nothing in common with a train going off the tracks. Nothing except the damage.

Don Imus deserves to be fired. He probably should have been fired quite a while ago -- say, when he called Gwen Ifill a "cleaning lady". But he should be fired now. Because some things are just not OK.

***

A few more notes:

Religion and Rationalization at DOJ

by publius

In this column, Dahlia Lithwick explores one of the most fascinating sidebars to the U.S. Attorney scandal -- religion and the DOJ. Using Monica Goodling as an example, she documents how deeply Regent University Law School graduates have penetrated the upper echelons of the Bush administration. Like Lithwick, I don’t have a problem with the administration hiring Regent grads (assuming they’re qualified). In fact, I’ve worked with outstanding attorneys who graduated from Regent.

What interests me then is not so much why DOJ hired Regent grads, but why Regent grads like Monica Goodling acted like they did. In particular, it’s the psychological and sociological dimensions that intrigue me. How did someone like Goodling justify her actions in her own mind? How did she square them with her religious faith? [For what it’s worth, these questions extend well beyond Goodling. How (and why), for instance, do so many social conservatives tolerate and even applaud our detention “policy” and war and unprogressive tax structures and so on?]

With respect to the more narrow Goodling question, Lithwick proposes an answer -- people like Goodling started mistaking Bush for God. She writes, “[T]he real concern here is that Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God's work with the president’s.” While that’s true in a sense, I don’t think it goes far enough. Assuming Lithwick is right, the more fundamental question is how Goodling (and other evangelicals) got to that point in the first place.

To take a step back, although liberals are not hostile to religion, I do think that they -- in their own minds anyway -- often conceptualize evangelical Christians in very simple ways. People get these visions of brainwashed automatons marching to the beat of Dobson and his P-Funk All-Stars. The truth is, though, that social conservatives -- like all other groups -- have a unique and complex psychology. And in their own mind, they (like everyone else) think of themselves as good people doing good things. That’s why it’s interesting to explore the specific rationalizations they use to justify actions that are hypocritical in light of their religious faith.

The first rationalization relates to our old friend, liberal hatred. I believe that evangelicals like Goodling are not so much pro-Republican as they are deeply, and even pathologically, anti-liberal. In this sense, Goodling represents the political coming-of-age of a generation of young social conservatives that has been taught from childhood to hate “the Left.” And it’s not just that the Left is bad, it’s that the Left is constantly attacking them from all directions -- e.g., the courts, the media, Hollywood, academia, etc. It’s all one big attack. I mean, Regent University is premised on the notion that Christians are under attack. (The Federalist Society was too – check out their mission statement).

Questions We Shouldn't Have To Ask

by hilzoy
You may recall that a few weeks ago, I quoted Paul Krugman, who asked: what about all those US Attorneys who didn't get fired? What did they do to keep their jobs? Here's one case that might be part of the answer:

"In a stunning reversal, a federal court of appeals struck down a state worker's fraud conviction that Wisconsin Republicans used in efforts to paint Gov. Jim Doyle's administration as corrupt.

Attorneys on both sides of the case said the three-judge panel likely overruled the trial jury's conviction of former state purchasing officer Georgia Thompson within hours of oral arguments due to a simple lack of evidence.

The decision by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, which will explain the judges' reasoning, was not immediately available.

"I have to say it strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin," federal Appeals Judge Diane Wood told prosecutors. "I'm not sure what your actual theory in this case is."

The court heard arguments in the case Thursday morning and then ordered a trial judge to free Thompson from a federal prison in Illinois, which she entered in November.

Thompson was a civil service employee last year when she was convicted of fraud after being accused of steering a state travel contract to a firm whose top officials were major campaign contributors to Doyle."

I gather that it is very, very unusual for an appeals court to reverse immediately, and order that the defendant be released from jail the same day. (I went looking for the opinion, which does not seem to have been issued yet; I found the order reversing her conviction, which says, among other things: "The United States must make arrangements so that she may be released before the close of business today." The justices do not seem to be in the mood to tolerate delays.)

Here's something else about this case (from the same article):

"Thompson's conviction was used to batter Doyle during his successful re-election campaign last year. Republican challenger Mark Green and allies blasted the governor for the case in television ads.

Thursday, Doyle praised the appeals court ruling but saved his strongest words for what he called "sensationalized media reports and partisan attacks" on his administration that turned Thompson into a "political football."

"This conviction was a terrible injustice," Doyle said. "Georgia Thompson is an innocent woman who was imprisoned for more than four months just for doing her job. It is great for her that the Court of Appeals has taken this extraordinary action so she does not have to spend one more night in prison.""

We do not know that this was a politically motivated prosecution. But we do know the following: Thompson was indicted and convicted during an election year. Her case was used as a political issue by the Republican candidate for governor. The evidence against her was so thin that the Court of Appeals reversed immediately and ordered her released the same day, which I gather it very rarely does. And the US Attorney who brought the case was not among those asked to resign.

Oh, and we also know this: Georgia Thompson just spent months in jail as a result of this prosecution.

We should not have to ask whether US Attorneys bring cases for political reasons. But we do.

What Country Is This, Again?

by hilzoy

Jack Balkin has posted a piece by Walter Murphy, a superb constitutional scholar at Princeton. He was flying to a conference; I'll quote most of his account:

"When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years."

"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said. "

"After carefully examining my credentials, the clerk asked if he could take them to TSA officials. I agreed. He returned about ten minutes later and said I could have a boarding pass, but added: "I must warn you, they=re going to ransack your luggage." On my return flight, I had no problem with obtaining a boarding pass, but my luggage was "lost." Airlines do lose a lot of luggage and this "loss" could have been a mere coincidence. In light of previous events, however, I'm a tad skeptical."

"I confess to having been furious that any American citizen would be singled out for governmental harassment because he or she criticized any elected official, Democrat or Republican. That harassment is, in and of itself, a flagrant violation not only of the First Amendment but also of our entire scheme of constitutional government. This effort to punish a critic states my lecture's argument far more eloquently and forcefully than I ever could. Further, that an administration headed by two men who had "had other priorities" than to risk their own lives when their turn to fight for their country came up, should brand as a threat to the United States a person who did not run away but stood up and fought for his country and was wounded in battle, goes beyond the outrageous. Although less lethal, it is of the same evil ilk as punishing Ambassador Joseph Wilson for criticizing Bush's false claims by "outing" his wife, Valerie Plaime, thereby putting at risk her life as well as the lives of many people with whom she had had contact as an agent of the CIA."

Jack Balkin says this about Prof. Murphy:

"For those who do not know, Professor Murphy is easily the most distinguished scholar of public law in political science. His works on both constitutional theory and judicial behavior are classics in the field. Bluntly, legal scholarship that does not engage many themes in his book, briefly noted below, Constitutional Democracy, may be legal, but cannot be said to be scholarship. As interesting, for present purposes, readers of the book will discover that Murphy is hardly a conventional political or legal liberal. While he holds some opinions, most notably on welfare, similar to opinions held on the political left, he is a sharp critic of ROE V. WADE, and supported the Alito nomination."

I will add that while I have regretted not taking his Constitutional Interpretation course for decades, I knew a lot of people who did, and who talked about it extensively. If Prof. Murphy was some sort of flaming liberal, that fact was lost on us. He was brilliant and not given either to bias or to imagining things. Someone in the comments at Balkinization suggests that this story must be due to "Bush Derangement Syndrome"; I imagine that if I tried hard, I might be able to come up with a few people I've met who strike me as less likely to have made up a story for that reason, but I don't think the list would be all that long.

In this country, free speech is supposed to be protected. The right to free speech includes the right to be critical of the government. It is not just illegal to use speech critical of the government to put someone on a no fly list, it's antithetical to everything our country is supposed to stand for. The right to criticize the President without worrying about government retaliation is one of the most basic freedoms we have, and we should not tolerate any infringement of it. It's bad enough that the FBI has been spying on demonstrations. At least in that case, they have the excuse that they are on the lookout for plans of violence. That's not a very good excuse in a lot of cases -- my favorite being the group who feed vegetarian meals to the homeless (discussed here.) But putting people on the no fly list because they criticize the President, or detaining antiwar protesters who wear black, is over a whole different set of lines, lines we should never, never cross.

Easter Poetry

by hilzoy

"Easter

Rise, heart, thy lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him may'st rise:
That, as his death calcinèd thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and, much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art,
The cross taught all wood to resound his name
Who bore the same.
His stretchèd sinews taught all strings what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort, both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long;
Or, since all music is but three parts vied
And multiplied
Oh let thy blessèd Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art."

-- George Herbert

Demented Peep Art Open Thread

by hilzoy

For reasons best known to itself, the Washington Post has been running a Peeps Diorama Contest.

"There were copious dioramas with antiwar or patriotic themes ("Give Peeps a Chance" and "George Washingpeep Crossing the Delaware," for example). Several chronicled Britney Spears's meltdown in front of the "Peeparazzi." Two dioramas adapted a classic Charlton Heston movie line: "Soylent Green is Peeps!"

There were some that stretched the boundaries of taste, such as the diorama titled "Dear Metrobus: Please Stop Running Over Our Peeps," which featured a cardboard bus with prostrated marshmallow bunnies in front of it. And an Army officer stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, crafted a diorama of Saddam Hussein's execution, with a purple bunny Peep hanging from a noose.

As we said: Wow."

Wow indeed. You can see the top 21 here (alas, none of the Britney Spears dioramas made the cut.) Just to whet your appetite, here are two. First, 'To Catch A Peepator':

Second, 'Mommy Peepest (No More Wire Hangers)':

Happy Easter! Open thread.

Heh.

by hilzoy

This is by far the best version of this joke I've seen so far:

"The delegation arrived at the market [in Baghdad], which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees … and attack helicopters…. Sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests…. At a news conference shortly after their outing, Mr. McCain … and his three congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — "like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime," offered Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican. — New York Times

---

MY WIFE came into the living room wearing a Kevlar vest, helmet and night-vision goggles.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Have you completely forgotten, silly head? We're going to the market." (...)

Carol helped the boys get ready, putting on their sneakers and body armor. I phoned the Indiana National Guard so that they could radio the 434th Special Air Wing at Grissom Air Force Base, which in turn scrambled two F-14 Tomcats. Then we hopped in the wagon.

Carol and I moved to Muncie from Detroit. Frankly, we were tired of the noise, the dirt and the crime. Here, you feel so safe, as long as you move very quickly through the market, keep your head down and have appropriate air cover.

Carol handed each of the boys — 8 and 5, and a handful, let me tell you — a juice box, a Xanax and personalized Navy SEAL-issue GPS systems. (...)

I hit the gas and spun the car and parked in a ditch that had once been a Tasty Donut before a tactical nuclear weapon had decimated it. Great parking space, though.

I saw my neighbor, Larry, under his car, from the looks of it a spanking-new Bradley fighting vehicle. "Snipers today," Larry said with a smile.

"Nice ride, Larry," I said as I dove under the car, a sniper's bullet exploding inches away from my foot. "Looks solid."

"The hull is constructed of welded aluminum and spaced laminate armor," he said, burying his head in the dirt as another round came in. "The Israelis use them. I had an Explorer, but it was blown to bits last time I went out for garbage bags."

"Roomy?"

"Ton of room. Carries three crew, commander, gunner and driver, plus six fully equipped infantrymen. Mileage is awful, but with all the space in the back, it's great for the market." (...)

Larry asked me to cover him, and he rolled out from under the BFV and hopped in. I activated heavy smoke bombs, and his car tore out of the field. I made it back to my car as Larry's choppers came in low over the market, taking heavy fire and destroying the sniper's den (about time, thank you very much) as well as a Toys R Us that was closed for renovation.

I could see the smoke in the rear-view mirror when Carol dove onto the hood, managing to hold onto the bundles (that woman never ceases to amaze me). I hit the brakes and she got in quickly.

"You put on face paint," I said, giving her a quick kiss. (...)

"You kids have fun?" Carol asked.

"Yeah!" said Chip.

"He was holding a loaf of bread and it got blown out of his hand!"

"It was so awesome, Mum."

We all laughed. Really hard. That's how shopping is in Indiana in the summer. It's just fun. It's fun and safe and hopeful and full of warm and welcoming Indianans and insurgents and snipers and bombs.

"Oh darn," Carol said.

"What is it, honey?"

"We forgot milk.""

Limbaugh And Cheney And Stalin

by hilzoy

Our charming Vice President sat down for an interview with Rush Limbaugh yesterday. In addition to the Vice President's claim that there were links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, the interview contained a few special delights. For instance, there's this, about the Democrats in Congress:

"Q Can you share with us whether or not you understand their devotion, or their seeming allegiance to the concept of U.S. defeat?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't."

That's pretty offensive. But not nearly as offensive as this, from a discussion of Bush's recess appointment of Sam Fox, one of the people who funded the Swift Boat ads:

"This is the kind of move that garners a lot of support from the people in the country. This shows the administration willing to engage these people and not allow them to get away with this kind of -- well, my term -- you don't have to accept it -- Stalinist behavior from these people on that committee.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, you're dead on, Rush."

Dead on! Look -- it's Harry Reid! Or maybe Nancy Pelosi with a moustache! I'm somewhere in the faceless crowd, staring up in adoration.

What Limbaugh and Cheney are talking about is: the Senate's failure to confirm someone for an ambassadorship. I wonder which of Stalin's actions Limbaugh and Cheney think that's like. Was it, perhaps, like causing the Ukraine famine? Like Stalin sending people to find and confiscate hoarded grain:

-- grain that the families who had grown it were trying desperately to keep, because their children looked like this:

Hmm: that doesn't seem quite like denying someone an appointment as Ambassador to Belgium. Perhaps Limbaugh and Cheney had in mind something like what Stalin did to these men:

They are prisoners in the Gulag, and they are in the process of digging a 141 mile canal with those pitiful implements you see in the picture. No one knows how many of them died in the course of building it; Wikipedia puts the figure at 100,000. Oddly enough, though, this doesn't seem all that comparable either.

I'd post pictures of the purges, but I don't think there are any. Besides, failing to confirm someone as Ambassador to Belgium isn't all that much like killing millions of people either.

Perhaps, in Rush Limbaugh's and Dick Cheney's imaginations, not confirming someone to be ambassador to Belgium, after which he can either go off and live a happy life or be given a recess appointment, is like causing the deaths of millions. In that case, they should probably be institutionalized. If not, they should stop trivializing some of the greatest atrocities in human history.

Rwanda: Genocide And A Hero

by hilzoy

Thirteen years ago today, a plane carrying Juvénal Habyarimana, the President of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi, was shot down. This event started the Rwandan genocide, which lasted for about three months. During that time, about eight hundred thousand people were killed, many hacked to death with machetes. To commemorate this, I want to repost something I wrote two years ago.

***

Instead of writing about the genocide, I want to focus on Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese military observer who was profiled in the excellent Frontline program Ghosts of Rwanda. His background was unremarkable: according to the profile on the Frontline site, "Capt. Mbaye, a devout Muslim, was one of nine children from a poor family on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal's capital. He was the first in his family to go to college. After graduating from the University of Dakar, he joined the army and worked his way up through the ranks."

But what he did during the Rwandan genocide was extraordinary. Again, from Frontline:

""A real-life Cool Hand Luke…"

"The bravest of the brave…"

"...the greatest man I have ever known..."

These are the words of those who knew Capt. Mbaye Diagne, a young Senegalese army officer who served in Rwanda as an unarmed U.N. military observer. I have never heard another human being described in the way that those who knew Mbaye describe him: he was, as one of his colleagues told me, "the kind of guy you meet once in a lifetime."

He was a hero.

From literally the first hours of the genocide, Capt. Mbaye simply ignored the U.N.'s standing orders not to intervene, and single-handedly began saving lives. He rescued the children of the moderate Prime Minster Agathe Uwilingiyimana, after 25 well-armed Belgian and Ghanaian U.N. peacekeepers surrendered their weapons to Rwandan troops. The Rwandan troops killed Madame Agathe (and, later, ten Belgian peacekeepers), while the unarmed Capt. Mbaye -- acting on his own initiative -- hid the Prime Minister's children in a closet.

In the days and weeks that followed, Capt. Mbaye became a legend among U.N. forces in Kigali. He continued his solo rescue missions, and had an uncanny ability to charm his way past checkpoints full of killers. On one occasion he found a group of 25 Tutsis hiding in a house in Nyamirambo, a Kigali neighborhood that was particularly dangerous. Capt. Mbaye ferried the Tutsis to the U.N. headquarters in groups of five -- on each trip passing through 23 militia checkpoints with a Jeep-load of Tutsis. Somehow, he convinced the killers to let these Tutsis live."

Here's an interview with Gromo Alex, the head of the U.N. Humanitarian Assistance Team in Rwanda:

" -- "Who was Mbaye Diagne and what was he doing?

He had access to most of the areas … the military or gendarme or presidential guard. He covered all the territory, knew most of the people in the command structure. But fairly early on, we could see in this back room in the Amahoro hotel [that] large groups of people all of a sudden appeared and [the] next day were gone. We began to put together that Mbaye was bringing people from all over to the headquarters and then evacuating them or having them picked up and taken to safety elsewhere. And I don't even know the numbers of the people that he saved. But a lot of people know who he is. A lot of people were saved by him, and not just Rwandans but famous journalists. I think they were put in positions where their lives were pretty close to an end, and he stepped in and saved them. (...)

-- But wasn't it against orders to go out and start saving people?

Yeah, it was against orders, and the orders were not to intervene in the conflict. Mbaye ignored those orders, and at the same time his general [Gen. Dallaire] knew what he was doing, never stopped him.

… I would think that the general saw him as some expression of what we were supposed to be doing. … But here's someone who stepped out of line and [the general is] not going to discipline him because he's doing the right thing. And he saved at least hundreds of people. And we're talking about saving hundreds of people three or four at a time. So you imagine y'know, when we talk about the 23 checkpoints. And you take even 200 people, you divide it by the maximum 5 -- that would mean he [would] have 5 people in a vehicle, which is too conspicuous too. So he would do it in smaller numbers so that he wouldn't draw so much attention to people. But he'd go through all these checkpoints. And at every checkpoint you have to explain yourself. ...

-- How would he get through?

That's just the way he was. People laughed. Even they have, or had, some attachment to a real world where there's real laughter. Even in all this gore, hatred; as long as you can have that brief glimpse of his smile, or laugh about something that's good, you'll grab onto it. And with Mbaye I think that's what everybody did. At all those checkpoints, they all knew him. …"

Unfortunately, he was killed at a checkpoint. Gromo Alex again:

"[Once] it was time to leave, the plan was that we were all just going to leave at the same time. … Then Mbaye said no, [because] he had some other things to do. It turned out that he was making arrangements to go get some other people. … But he had to go to headquarters first. So we went down the hill to ICRC. … We stopped there for a couple minutes. …

So we're coming up the hill and hear something on the radio. … We heard it was [Mbaye] had, I guess, pulled up a minute after we'd gone to the bridge, the last checkpoint. A mortar had landed behind his car and shrapnel came through the back window and [hit him] in the back of his head, and apparently killed him instantly. …

This was the day that General Dallaire had gone to Nairobi to meet with some U.S. congressmen to convince them of the gravity of the situation. [So] we're stunned, and we're trying to figure out what's happening, what we can do. People are talking about going [and] getting his dress uniform. They're calling around for a body bag. But there's no body bag. Not a body bag in the whole U.N. The ICRC doesn't have any body bags that they can spare. At this time, we're starting to put together and we're saying, you know, "Here's a guy who gave his ultimate, did everything, and we don't even have a body bag to show him some respect." So we're scrambling [and] people are asking us -- we're the humanitarians, we can get some plastic sheeting, we can make something. I can't even remember [the details]. It was kind of a daze. …

We had some UNICEF plastic sheeting, and we had some tape. Mbaye's body comes, and he's a big man, tall, big feet. He's on a stretcher now. Nobody knows exactly what to do, but we're going to make a body bag. … You want to do it right. You want to … zip it, [but] you got this U.N. light blue body bag, and we're going to make and fold the edges over. We're folding them up, and the creases aren't right, because his feet are so damn big. … You don't want that for him. You want it to be, like, just laid out perfectly, so that when people look at him, they know that he was something great."

While my government was devoting its energies to figuring out how to describe what was happening in Rwanda without using the word "genocide", Mbaye Diagne just saw what had to be done and did it, at the cost of his own life. He is one of my personal saints. I think that when you find a saint, you should reflect on his life, try to learn from it, and do him honor. If anyone agrees, link to this post: Mbaye Diagne and what he did deserve to be better known.

Toujours National Poetry Month

by hilzoy

"There Pass The Careless People

There pass the careless people
That call their souls their own:
Here by the road I loiter,
How idle and alone.

Ah, past the plunge of plummet,
In seas I cannot sound,
My heart and soul and senses,
World without end, are drowned.

His folly has not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.

There flowers no balm to sain him
From east of earth to west
That's lost for everlasting
The heart out of his breast.

Here by the labouring highway
With empty hands I stroll:
Sea-deep, till doomsday morning,
Lie lost my heart and soul.

-- A. E. Housman"