Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement." - Jimmy Carter

Reading: E. Nesbit, The Railway Children

Listening to: nothing

Decluttering accomplishments: went through a bit of household paperwork, did laundry

30 September 2001 - Play-ing Around With Foreign Policy

I tried a minor experiment on my drive to Azusa for a meeting on Wednesday. Namely, listening to a play on tape, instead of the news on the radio. I'd picked up the L.A. Theatreworks production of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple and it was a very enjoyable way to cope with a stressful drive. In the morning, the stress came from the sun being in my eyes most of the way, while the afternoon stress was largely traffic related. Once I'm past downtown, I have alternate ways of getting home, but I'm not really up to meandering around surface streets in East L.A.. While I did like the play (Nathan Lane, who I have an entirely unreasonable dislike of, is more tolerable when I don't have to look at him), I thought they could have organized the cassettes better. Tape 1 used all of side 1 and about 10 minutes of side 2. And tape 2 used not quite all of side 1 and none of side 2. So there's an awkward amount of fast forwarding involved. I'm still planning to see what other plays they've recorded.

And then Friday night I went to see Kiss Me Kate at the Shubert. It's my favorite theatre to go to in L.A. for one silly reason. Namely, it's in Century City - less than 3 miles away. It lacks the elegance of the Pasadena Playhouse or the Alex in Glendale and has fewer major productions than either the Pantages in Hollywood or the Music Center, but the ease of getting there helps a lot. The book has obvious weaknesses, including an entirely implausible ending, but you can't really go wrong with Cole Porter. And both Rachel York and Rex Smith were excellent. I expected as much of her, but was pleasantly surprised to see how much Smith has matured as a performer. Admittedly, it had been nearly twenty years since I last saw him (as Frederick in Pirates of Penzance) so the improvement should not be so surprising.

I really do need to find time to get to New York. I want to see The Producers (despite Nathan Lane) and Urine-town. The latter is the sort of thing that I'd normally dismiss as too weird, but it stars John Cullum. I would go to see John Cullum open a supermarket. But I don't really see when I can get away for a long weekend until the spring. Sigh.

On a more serious subject, my quest to discover if anything else has happened in the world since the terrorist attacks led me to BBC news and, specifically, their coverage of African news. The ups and downs of Zimbabwean land reform continue, of course, but the story I wanted to mention is further west. Specifically, in Mali, where increased security at the U.S. embassy in Bamako is causing protests by local merchants. It sounds like a legitimate gripe - customers can't get to the merchants because the embassy has had streets blocked off. The complication is that the U.S. government has been planning to move the embassy out of central Bamako for a while, but that could take years. It seems to me that the obvious thing to do is to compensate merchants for the cost of relocating away from their current, inaccessible locations.

But then I realized something. Is the U.S. embassy really the only one in the area? That would be quite unusual if it were. In pretty much every country I've been to, there's a diplomatic quarter, with several embassies clustered together. The only maps of Bamako I could find on-line showed only one other embassy, though (the French embassy, which is in the central city, but on the banks of the Niger). So it's hard to say. There are addresses on another web page, but that isn't particularly helpful other than to highlight how few countries maintain a diplomatic presence in Mali.

I still think that compensating the merchants would be the right gesture for the U.S. to make, even if there are other embassies in the area. We're a bigger target for resentment than, say, Senegal would be, so we should watch our behavior more. While Mali is not a country that is ever likely to pose any particular threat to us (and, for that matter, is not a country that more than a handful of Americans could identify on a map), we do have a responsibility to act decently.