Again, and Again...

[rain_gryphon]

There've been these weird, evocative echoes of my childhood in the news of late. First that guy in DC who calmly poured a can of gasoline over himself and lit himself on fire. I haven't seen that done since I was little, when the Vietnamese Buddhists used to set themselves on fire to protest against Christianity*. Still no news about what this guy intended.

Now there's a Cyclone of Doom barrelling up the Bay of Bengal. I remember how deeply the Bengal Cyclone of 1970 impressed me. That was in the news for months. That one, IIRC, hit in the middle of the night, and while people know that a storm was coming, they didn't expect the sea to come sweeping 20 feet deep miles inland. I remember reading all these accounts, roughly similar, of people waking up to find that the sea was pouring into their houses, and having to swim for their lives until sometime the next day. There were pictures of areas just completely covered with drowned people and cattle. Things are better these days, when people at least get some advance warning.

* Modern accounts will generally tell you that it was a protest against the war, but actually it was against the Thieu government's embrace of Catholicism.

*****

So, that Malala Yousefzai didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize. It's not at all clear to me how getting shot by terrorists advances the cause of peace anyway. If there were a Nobel Prize for being a thoroughgoing hardass, she should certainly have that.

For myself, I can confidently state that if there were people intending to shoot me... again... like they did once already... for going to school, I'd probably conclude that there wasn't that that much else that I really needed to learn.

*****

If you look at the history of the Nobel Peace Prize since the 1970s, it's pretty obvious that what it's being awarded for is for keeping middle eastern tensions high, but short of open war. That keeps the price of oil high, which is important to Norway since that accounts for about a third of the government's revenue.

*****

On reflection, fire seems to have been a major thematic element in the news of the 1960s. I remember the Buddhist monks calmly burning themselves; that appalling picture of the napalmed little Vietnamese girl running down the road screeching, with her skin still smoking; orange and black clouds of napalm rolling across the jungle, again and again, on the nightly news; the ghettoes burning each summer; the Klan burning crosses; and of course that holocaust at the '64 Five Hundred. And our barbecue grill, of course, on fire most nights in good weather.

I never consciously thought about it before, but I do have a strong association of the 1960s with fire.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Did you know that the little girl survived and eventually emigrated to America?

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to know that she did. That picture's always haunted me. She seemed so absolutely bereft in that picture, in a pain and horror that cut her off from all the rest of the world. It's good to know that there was some existence for her past that moment.

[pyesetz]

If you look at the history of the Nobel Peace Prize since the 1970s, it's pretty obvious that what it's being awarded for is for keeping middle eastern tensions high, but short of open war. That keeps the price of oil high, which is important to Norway since that accounts for about a third of the government's revenue.

Brilliant!  It is not often that I read a sentence like that and immediately think, "I hadn't noticed that before, but he's right!"

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I'm often right, and it's seldom noticed.