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The Pointless Loss of El Faro

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

About three miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, 35 nautical miles north of Crooked Island in the Bahamas, at 23.2°N 73.7°W, rests SS El Faro, a 790-foot-long cargo ship that was lost at sea on October 1, a victim of Hurricane Joaquin. The ship and her entire 33-man crew were lost; other than one unidentifiable body and an empty lifeboat in a debris field, little else has yet been found. (The ship had two lifeboats that had more than enough space for the entire crew as well as supplies; it is unknown if the crew, a well-trained crew of professionals, even had the chance to abandon ship.)

El Faro had been on its way from Jacksonville, Florida, to Puerto Rico. And there lies the problem. It did not need to be there, stormy day or sunny day, and it does not now need to be at the bottom of the Atlantic, with 33 dead. An American law known colloquially as the Jones Act created the reason the ship was where it was and now, where it is.
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Down with Renoir!

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The anti-Renoir movement continues to get (tongue-in-cheek) coverage and has announced a march at “High Noon” this Saturday, October 17, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Mark Aldrich's avatarThe Gad About Town

Yesterday at noon, protesters began to chant: “Rosy cheeks are for clowns / Do your job, take them down.” Another: “God hates Renoir! God hates Renoir!” The number of people attending the protest in front of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts numbered in the middle-to-high single digits, according to reports.

Max Geller, a political organizer, hates Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the Impressionist painter who died in 1919 and never used anything but pastels in any of his several many famous and gigantic works. If one could type a sentence that used air quotes and then took them away and then replaced them again, one might perhaps begin to convey a sense of how completely almost serious and almost mocking and yet earnestly this hatred is felt.

Protest is important. In a free country, one ought to be able to protest anything and everything. This happens to be a free country…

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Crucifixion for Protest

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Reports out of In Saudi Arabia about the case of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr tonight, September 23, are grim. We may wake to unbearably sad news tomorrow (it is 10:45 p.m. EST as I type these words).

Reliable sources report that Ali is scheduled to be executed by beheading tomorrow and then his body will be crucified and hoisted up on a pole and displayed to show all who see what can befall a young man unlucky enough to be born in that barbaric nation in this current, sanguinary period in its history. Ali was arrested at a protest in 2012 when he was 17 years of age; he was charged with many crimes, it seems likely he did not commit any.

The holiday of Eid al-Adha is upon us. In Egypt, President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi pardoned two journalists, Mohammed Fahmy, a Canadian, and Baher Mohamed, an Egyptian, along with several dozen other prisoners. Fahmy and Mohamed were released; their colleague, Peter Greste, was deported in February, and he may have been included in the long list of those pardoned today. I wrote about Fahmy’s case last month: https://thegadabouttown.com/2015/08/29/a-farce-in-egypt/.

It is believed that al-Sisi acted in accordance with a tradition of granting pardons on this most solemn of holy days. Eid commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son, Isaac, out of respect for God’s will; because Isaac was spared thanks to God sending an angel to halt the proceedings out of God’s respect for Abraham’s seriousness of intent, Eid is marked with similar pardons granted by political leaders.

But a willingness to sacrifice a child is sometimes marked by actually murdering the child. That sick possibility is what is perhaps about to befall a young man who walked out on a street on the wrong day to do so in Saudi Arabia.

(Two sources: https://www.movements.org/market/1327 and http://m.france24.com/ar/20150923-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D8%B9%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%B4%D8%A7%D8%A8-%D8%B4%D9%8A%D8%B9%D8%A9-%D9%82%D8%B7%D8%B9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D8%A3%D8%B3-%D8%A7%D8%AD%D8%AA%D8%AC%D8%A7%D8%AC%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%AD%D9%82%D9%88%D9%82-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D9%85%D8%B1)

Mark Aldrich's avatarThe Gad About Town

No one knows when or where—and it is possible that by the time you read this, the punishment will have been carried out today—but sometime soon, now that it has been learned that an appeal was denied, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr will be beheaded and then his remains will be mounted on two boards and put on display. In his country, this practice is known as “crucifixion.”

It is not a common means of treating a prisoner who has been sentenced to death in his home country. Beheading someone and then displaying the body is reserved only for those who have committed the most heinous of crimes, like show up at a protest.

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