On to 2017 for Shawkan

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A journalist’s job is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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The ordeal that the photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid (“Shawkan”) has endured since 2013 will continue into 2017, it was learned earlier today at a hearing of the Cairo Criminal Court in Egypt. The next hearing for the 700-plus defendants arrested in August 2013 in the round-up of a sit-it is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, January 17.

At court today, ten defendants were ordered to be released for health reasons, but Shawkan was not among them. His family reports that his health is deteriorating.

The photo at top was taken by the photojournalist Mohamed El Raai today. The new year merely brings a continuation of a long story.

Shawkan’s story is one of the denial of basic human rights by a nation allied with Western governments, but it also has been a story of many citizens stepping up and making certain that Shawkan’s story is heard. Both stories are worth knowing.

For those unaware of Shawkan’s story, I wrote the following background article:
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Today in History: Dec. 27

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, a play by J. M. Barrie, made its theater debut on this date in 1904 at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London.

It introduced audiences to Neverland, Peter Pan, Wendy Darling and her brothers, Captain Hook, the Lost Boys, and Tinker Bell. (A playbill from the first production is at top.)
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‘Well, So That Is That’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The concluding sections of W.H. Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, continue his blend of the contemporary and everyday with the mysterious and eternal. All of modern philosophy is briefly made to vanish in a blur of the mundane world:

But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays.

The fact of faith—not what one has faith in, but that faith exists, is a reality itself—that is the miracle of the day, is what Christmas is about:

Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

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