An Untold Story

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”—James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” was published in 1791, a little more than six years after Johnson’s death. It is not a biography as readers may think of a biography: the recounting of incidents from a life of action. The poet W.H. Auden said that writers are “makers, not doers” and thus he, Auden, was not going to write his memoirs. We need biographies of the doers in order to learn what was happening behind the scenes, how close the men of action came to disaster and saved their (and sometimes, our) day, he suggested. Johnson’s life was the life of a man of letters, a life spent writing plays, compiling the first major English dictionary, compiling an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, writing weekly columns on every topic his extraordinary mind could entertain. He was a maker.
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A Message from Shawkan

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Mahmoud Abu Zeid is a photojournalist whose work you may very well have seen in recent years, as his photographs have appeared in Time magazine, news services throughout Europe, and they were syndicated by Corbis, a major syndicate. (One photo is reprinted below the fold.) He photographed everyday life in Egypt as well as breaking news stories like the protests in Tahrir Square and the trial of former president Hosni Mubarak. His professional name is Shawkan.

Shawkan was arrested in Cairo, Egypt, in a round-up during nation-wide protests on August 14, 2013. He was arrested while doing his job, while taking photos of the protests and the crackdown. It is believed that about 1000 people lost their lives across Egypt in the police actions against the protests that day, and several thousand were arrested, all in the name of stopping the Muslim Brotherhood. Shawkan was arrested in a mass round-up, and he remains just one more face and name in a large crowd: on December 12, he will be a part of a “mass trial of 738 defendants.”

As of today, December 4, 2015, he has spent 842 days in pre-trial detention. Even though his first court session is due to take place on December 12, his lawyer reported to Amnesty International this fall that he had yet to see Shawkan’s case file. Under Egyptian law, there is a two-year cap on pre-trial detention; 842 days is longer than two years.
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A Moral Choice

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Those who oppose it [gun control] have made a moral choice: that they would rather have gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns owned—just as faith healers would rather watch children die than accept the reality of scientific medicine. This is a moral choice; many faith healers make it to this day, and not just in thought experiments. But it is absurd to shake our heads sapiently and say we can’t possibly know what would have saved those lives …”—Adam Gopnik, “The Simple Truth About Gun Control” The New Yorker, December 19, 2012

“All politics is local” is a beloved truism in American public life. The sheriff of the New York county in which I used to live is in international headlines today because he took advantage of yesterday’s two gun sprees to urge gun-owning citizens of his county to start carrying their weapons with them just in case.

Ulster County Sheriff Paul J. Van Blarcum published a release on Facebook this morning that was shared several thousand times within an hour of its posting and received international attention because Ulster County is nowhere near either of the two incidents so he decided to jump on board a train of his own invention before it left the station and also because it is bluntly pro-gun:
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