Revoluçao dos Cravos

 

A revolution, or revoluçao as spoken in the noble Lusitanian tongue, which has hardly been forgotten but - like the regime which it ended - overlooked in its execution, ,composition, result - and largely, which is hard to disentangle from the legacious and enduring war in Angola, or rather, the Savimbi phase of it, its causes - is that which sprung out like a quickly blossoming spring on the 25th of April, or 25 de Abril, the name of the previously named Ponte Salazar still making a red scar across Lisbon, five days and five decades ago. It was in reality a revolution both long and short in the making, which preceded the more anticipated, and more present - although arguably more violent - one in Spain the following years. 

And it should be called a revolution, not only for the mark of the time and the drastic circumstances which it changed, if perhaps inexorably, with the ejection of the civilian bureaucratic regime 

Ever Agatha

 

The great Agatha Christie, known as Lady Agatha in her closing years as so many of her peers, passed nearly half a century ago, closing a final page on a literary career begun over another half before with Curtain and Sleeping Murder (and a number of less-read short stories), cutting short a career as extensive as her own... two, including the slightly less iconic and extensive one of the ever-Miss Marple (herself never a Lady) and, quite complimentary, immortalised by an almost cancerous stream of adaptations, second only to her peer, colleague (their publishing overlapping, in fact) and countryman Sir Conan Doyle, a name used (perhaps unintentionally, although her style and sense of detail may preclude only a direct intent on her part, if we are to judge the queen of murders by her own standard) in Death on the Nile. 

As Kenneth Branagh . I must confess to not liking this strongly, although I felt a certain glee against my poor expectations (either a good or a bad feeling, depending on your personality) that it felt, above anything, to be complimentary to its nearly insurmountable 1974 predecessor, which even the talented Branagh could impossibly have rushed to shoot himself, much less playing the iconic lead (doing both, to this Lumet-Finney backdrop, is impressive enough). As I rewatched it, with its competing (or, diplomatically, complimenting) movie siblings I found these strengths played stronger, and having re-read the book it is indeed both surreal and quite charming. More beautifully shot, but with some crazy, hence not too impressive CGI imagery, with a cast intending to , . 

Sadly, some (inescapable, but here almost deliberately obvious) anachronisms are glaring from the letter, specifically relating to current-day, or perhaps eternal, questions of ethnicity and gender. The considerations of an exiled white Russian noblewoman for the possible (and then quite noticeable) ascent of an American actress to a directorial position, however personally explicable through the relationship therein exposed, is plain ridiculous, if overshadowed (at least in terms of very contemporary American political discourse) by the assumption that royal Yugoslavian police would, naturally, slate a Hispanic passenger for judicial murder. Really? Not the Italian, Austrian? How about, just for sake of variation and anticlimax, pose the danger of the police covering the thing up? The addition of Johnny Depp, among no less impressive contemporaries (here seemingly pressed by things current, and about to come flailing in his face the following years, but to no damage to his take on the obnoxious American, as if he were - in the words of Fantine - already dead) . On the subject of overacting, the action sequences. Overplay? Sure, though perhaps . On the note of action; if Branagh's Poirot, undeniably more physical and athletic than his illustrious predecessors - and, as the script very clearly puts out, a former policeman at that. -he might as well match the over-dramatic, almost perversely decadent moustache with some physical discipline. As far as , the clear departure from the Finney, and more so Suchet (Agatha's favourite, for my money) adaptions, 

 

One of many incarnations. Ken's Poirot and Daisy as Mary Debenham, previously viewed by millions of fans of the 1974 picture cherished even by Christie herself (a rare gem) and the 2010 installment in the series - bearing her name - by Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Jessica Chastain and the David Suchet. 

The following adaption, just as audaciously chosen to be Death on the Nile, one of the favourites certainly of the post-Christie era, and just as undeniably a 1970s cinematic classic, and . This I liked a bit more, although if failed, more so upon rewatch, to live up to the illustrious mark. Adding to the 1978 classic, which was decadent and elephantine in its magnitude if nothing else, but with certain narrative perplexities (such as the continuity in the moment of Doyle's solitude, and the subtle cut to his widower status) and ultimately Ustinov's ability to supplant Finney as a credible Poirot, doing so by playing to a different character. The Suchet adaption is, adding to this, magnificent in its own right and, while with a smaller budget (even in dollar figures) and fewer minutes, admittedly also with less famous actors (although Emily Blunt would certainly eclipse Gadot or Lois Chiles eventually). Suchet, although then very established in the role since Ustinov's twilight, added , with even some sadistic impulses unleashed quite coldly on the breaking culprit.  

The India Question

 

The unspoken, but still valid assumption that China is inadequately discussed and debated in the talk of the new world order, replicates itself as the world's most populous democracy (or is that "most popular" democracy...? Some, and as for now migrant flows, may differ...) and now populous (or popular) country full stop - no discussions on micro-states here - and whether India, seventy-five and some years since independence from the colonial, outspokenly imperial grasp of the Britain then still an empire... a fact so very changed in the infancy of never-Emperor Charles I(II) will take a place and shape, as well as being shaped by a successive string of foreign rulers and invaders since the Original Aryans and before. Never before, since the rise of the American experiment on the world stage and likely not since long before that, has an actor been so unspokenly derided, insulted without the slightest intention 

Why is that? 

Folkets val

 

Om något i livet är säkert, för att inleda den första svenska krönikan (?) på läänge med en parafras på den olycksdrabbade hemvändande sonen Corleone, så är det att utträdarna (khawarij, på det ädla arabiska tungomålet) Sara Skyttedal och Jan Emanuel Johanssons - en duo osedvanligt igenkännbar genom sina ömse akronym - nya parti inte kommer att bli en större succé. Men det kan vara på plats att diskutera vad som här, och mycket senkommet, väntar på att födas, och 

De utkastades osköna nya allians. 

Detta, en 

A New Era, and the Brunt of this Green New World of ours

With regard to the challenges of the future 

I solemnly acknowledge I haven't given this topic full coverage, as I have given no topic in the latest years, or any time before, and for that reason there is, I hope, particular venom to appreciate this particular angle. Not only is humanity facing multiple crises broadly interlinked and related to overconsumption, overpopulation and over-technologisation (for this particular, nasty, truth, see Jevons paradox, no apostrophe, and then compare to the ever-pliant and ever-reproducing Amish, who will inherit the American earth if scary demographic trends is anything to go by) but also biting itself in the foot in the brave attempt at eluding these crises, tightening the proverbial noose by outsourcing , further stoking a paradoxical dependence on primitive fossil fuels in the process of abandoning them and jumping ship. 

Undoubtedly, these crises interlinked will herald a new era of unassailable and incalculable proportions, altering the equilibrium for human survival on earth (admittedly, a very precautious and precise one at first, and it sure has been worse, even in the absence of thermonuclear device which, then, would mostly have been thought as an obliquely clever machination to preserve heat) and, in all likelihood and with some inherited optimism, providence or god or our unmade nature will not be completely erased, although conditions as well as the purported loss of death - or rather premature death - will mean incalculable psychological harm for those lucky to carry the torch through the new era. As the Klown once mused at the prospects of a television-free future, egotistically recognising his jugular for what it is, the survivors may well envy the dead. 

Carrying the weight of the future... or its obstacle, rooted in an economic order not nestled in the consideration of further hundreds, or millions, of generations but the development of humanity beyond the capacity of its (current) habitation, with consequences blooming those beyond the capacity of readily available remedies. Malthus or techno-hubris, the adaption of the future within the confines of the present does, no doubt, pose the greatest question above the horizon since the advent of nuclear weapons, and since well before and beyond it. 

The development of this conundrum, posed by a combination of a post-industrial order without which we would sooner not endure (would not, most of us, now even in Third World countries, foreclosing any vague fantasy of returning to the past by those deeming themselves most progressive) and the population explosion permitted, if not demanded, by this greatest revolution, having now advanced into the stage of micro-chips, the ever-present "smartphone" and the purposed Artificial Intelligence now born like a prodigal son, a digital Zeus - or, as Nietzsche would have it, the sons of Adam - developed into a stage to slay its parent. 

And then, perhaps - which is often, and perhaps too often professed - maybe a great remedy is beyond our grasp? Beyond the question of human nature, determinism and representative democracy, which all put certain definite, if not immalleable constraints, on our collective decision-making, akin to the surgeon with a scalpel determined to dig out a cancerous but young tumour from his own belly, or collectively expected to do so to a third party by and before an audience, an example realised by group psychology, mental training and sectarianism, but often to great condemnation and resistance, there is perhaps variables not exactly determined, but which we have avoided in our attempt to rationalise our existence as well as the importance of human agency. To this, I can only offer a sigh of unresigned acceptance, of "well, at least I tried". 

McMurphy failed, or so we think at least, but the goal - undesirable or dangerous illusion - of breaking the window was reached. We would better put up resistance, and at the worst, we will have completely readjusted our economy . This has been done, gloriously or in vain, as it were, in response to the German, and Japanese (Italians need not bother) military threat to dominate the globe - meaning, as it still frequently does, the Eurasian landmass, or quite a lot thereof - and the result, for the survivors that is, was not necessarily bad, Stalinist and post-colonial (now inevitable, due to German-Japanese efforts) resettlements and re-drawings of maps without rulers notwithstanding. On the contrary, both for the colonial liberator (and post-colonial technocrat, at best) and European rising from the ashes, the following decades are frequently thought of as the best, the epitome of human existence, barring that question of nuclear warfare between he new, undisputed victors. Would this, a prospect of an "unnecessary" restoration, be something undesirable? Either we die, or many of us will die much sooner than they would have preferred, not because of but regardless of efforts to escape the same, or we survive knowing the neuroses of a great collective of scientists was just that... a collective response to certain trends, pointing fatefully, but ultimately misguidingly (is that a word?) towards a great need to sudden and dramatic adaption, no box office. 

The core question, leading me back to the topics I like to discuss, is that of external consequences and ulterior motives. The latter, usually not a concern of mine, is that of using the adaptive measures to 

The contradiction of new tech, its demands and the prospects for further consumption (the advent of independent currencies being one major demon to slay, although its demarcation by paying for its ecolocial effects would be more desirable) 

What then - as the now forgotten Russian author immemorialised by his reader V. I. Ulyanov, also more famous under a name of his own hand - is to be done? 

The Nobel Prize, the economy, and the laureate

"The Nobel laureate has died." Few words put a greater spell of insecurity, i.e. the sense of not feeling certain as to what my sentiments should be, as these aforementioned. 

The fact that this bank, whatever the decisions made within it, or the collective of minds having made their bread from it, is celebrated and was being dignified with this prize is, particularly to the Swedish mind, impossibly endearing, especially as a statement to a country which still finds it hard to be just a country. This is, however, a slightly chauvinistic point and certainly not justifying the grand exemption from the ironclad no-waterskiing-behind-the-Nobel-coattails rule. 

I have, however, felt a great joy over the varying disciplines - as opposed to the, justifiably, but not always defensibly so, predictable slate of Medicine, Physics, Chemistry laureates, and perhaps the same could be spoken for Literature - included in the vast, and perhaps controversial, line of Nobel economics" laureates. And no less so in knowldge of the work underlying some of them. And none, perhaps, speaks less to this than professor Kahneman, the psychologist who . Neurosurgery and neuroscience, which advances vastly beyond the Medicine discipline (as long as the, also very welcome, decision to grant aforementioned prize to Mr. Pääbo, again with the flag-touting chauvinism) 

The Virtue of Not Staying Silent

 

For years, it is said, the European Union has stayed silent on the topic of Israel, or more to the point on the (hardly contentious) point of Israeli settlers, in particular those not endorsed, in their occupation, even by the hitherto misnamed IDF and the nascently fascist, or so I am told, Netanyahu cabinet. This is all untrue, of course, because thus far and to go on, different European countries - with or without nuclear arsenals, and with or without membership in the democratic, liberal organisation said to embody the values of the continent, to the point of embodying the "continent" itself - have denounced, in the starkest terms 

What is particular about the meek utterances from the Brussels grayhairs, indeed, is the joint notion, ringing across the Atlantic, that resistance must be offered, however futile and feeble, against the Netanyahu government in its historic extremism, or mayhaps ahistoric extremism, in general and its Gaza "policies" in particular. This, spoke Brussels, is a line best not crossed. Realistically, however, it is not . And for its flaws, the Netanyahu government embodies the dreams of illiberal, or non-liberal democrats, being enslaved to no constitution, no supranational organisations, no outside body politic, only those , and the honorary Arab Israelis descendant from the unexpelled. 

The Virtue of Staying Silent

 

Silence is, indubitably, a virtue of many societies - and not just governments, or autocracies in general - though it has never been one of mine. 

On this note, the very predictable, and predictably attainted argument that Israeli war crimes, if we are to agree on that label at least (the possibility, at least, which does not exclude Hamas from the same) must not be compared to the crimes inflicted on the Jewish people, or millions of Jews to the tally of millions as well as a fewer number of Roma and a higher number of Slavs, lest the comparison is to be a wider insult than mere exaggeration of the volatile and sometimes violent acts of Israel, as a Jewish state. 

Further, the presumed contradiction between Israel's acts and its status as a democratic state, although not necessarily as a Jewish one (though more than a few rabbis, generally in the outlier, would assent to the latter criticism) is, if not entirely valid, quite cumbersome. 

Why then, should he shut up? With droves of "zoomer" voters going from verbal stormtroopers for the Biden-Harris-DNC cause, into political oblivion , of empty papers and Camelot scions, why not retest in part the argument for Israel, in part the vocabulary our debates on that topic is taking? First, by 

The death of the caliphate, a century later

 

When asked, by my tidy self, how to propose a "national day" for the secularists of the world - the broader Western world often bolstered with the near Russians steppes, the swathes of Africa separated from the rest of the continent by the Saharas, and the Orient so mysterious, yet so familiar compared to the lands beyond the Indus, since Alexander and before - I was relatively quick to propose March 3. Asides from personal arbitrary mnemonics - my mother being born on the 1st, and my oldest cousin and dearest friend on the 2nd, I 

In the best of cases, you won't notice it. (In the worst of cases...)

 

The long-discussed, longer-heralded, and often misrepresented case of Swedish "alliance-less-ness", sometimes elaborated into the famous adage of "pertaining to neutrality in wartime", or just "neutrality" in one ubiquitous term, finally reached an undoubted end with the accession - some would say long overdue, others long since a reality - in the White House before the presence of Secretary of State Blinken (one would hope, in this, a better representation of the Washington regime than his master) this Thursday. This Thursday, regardless of opinions of why and now and how it was accomplished, as well as the lingering, "slingering" path of appeasing erstwhile Turkish and Hungarian autocrats-turned-brothers in arms, will be remembered as the one when Sweden almost gracefully, snuck into the alliance of free states, "free" being the epithet so challenged by , as it has been before by Greece and Portugal, ignoring the wider question of colonial possessions (eyes on Portugal, or its vast southern and distant eastern provinces). 

While much in this process may be condemned, or more humbly not arouse so much admiration for its efficacy, elegance or adherence to democratic process - yes, I am of the view that just as the Swedish people was asked, and seemingly even respected in their consent or lack of the same, with regard to the dependence on Brussels bureaucrats and German(-hosted) bankers, 

My dear president... now is not the time for fear

The ascent of Alexei Navalny is a long, tenuous story, which will now undoubtedly have the glamour of legend, stamped - finally, perhaps inevitably - by the inerasible seal of martyrdoom. 

The 13th president

 

I believe "The 13th president of Finland. I believe Finland now gets a good president for the republic. Alexander Stubb is an experienced, competent person for the job. No more babble." With these words, perennial loser and finalist Pekka Haavisto conceded the second, his fourth, round in a presidential election closely, but not vitriolically fought amidst the cold marking this most northern of republics - bar Iceland - and the tensions between old Suomi and her longtime neighbour rising to new extremes hardly known since the now almost romantic time of war marked by the defence minister's words, that there is space for hundreds of thousands of more Russians, should they choose (or rather he) to cross this frontier now, by his making (or theirs) one with the very close-chested North Atlantic alliance now reaching both frontiers, quite soon I suspect, of smaller Atlantics. With the last ballots counted, the conclusions already drawn from the oft-supreme first round, and remade from the 2018 tally, that Haavisto had lost, and the candidate of unity or unspoken benefit of being everybody's (or close enough) second choice had won, the presidency was - quite historically - restored with a native Swedish speaker for the first time since the Marshal, an era of old, of post-independence now seemingly resurrected in symbology and word as well as in geopolitics. On that note, his words - although not much more popular than this blog - are well considered and enthusiastic and certainly measured to his benefit, 

Leviathan, uplifted by ballots, unconstrained by law

 

President Bukele, not just the last - or, now and again, one of the relatively recent - of colourful characters emerging as if for a party at the modest Sanchez residence (not the lavish one with the winking fish, whether the people of... not-Panama congregate to cherish the end of its strongman benefactor) but a force, as the . This much was clear after a resounding re-election which was nothing if not that, backed by a Lukashenko-like (starting to become a term in my household, I must admit) tally, which in all probability is also just that, and not Lukashenko-like in its conception, or the (not only Belarusian) tendency for early balloting long resting in those jars (but needless, should be questioned without the call of fascism... please) and deplorable in its acuity and margin leaving no . This was a blowout, pure and simple, and a denigration not just of those candidates put out to best this unlikely (?) two-time runner, not merely of those parties bearing the brunt of history, of blood and heavens within and above those who have governed this small, but not insignificant, nation across the decades of, and following, a difficult civil strife better addressed by another term (or terms, frequently used like lashes regarding the Ukrainian case) and bitterness eventually shared and co-habited in the interdependence of a new constitutional order. It was, as has been said before, well before the first ballot had been cast, the date set, the consideration of a candidate already within the presidential palace allowed (!) to pursue this second course in spite of the one-term limit imposed by so many American constitutions, including that of the short-lived (if it lived) Confederate States, and the relaxation demanded by others more liberally, including that of Chile (shaping the fates not just of would-be tyrants, with Eduardo Frei's non-candidacy in 1970 certainly affecting its course well beyond his, natural or otherwise, death) and Brazil (where Lula's ability to run in 2010 and beyond may have steered the big green country clear of o Bolsonarismo, but unlikely a lifelong constitutional term) since Roman times, when re-election was the supreme effort and crown - bar for the now-archaic censorship. 

The Brains (plural) of the Empire

The question of "who governs", full stop, has been a question in focus for sociologists and, in the realm of political science, for those truly seeking to commit (to) contribution. In its aptly more comical version (or am I indulging the politics of the present day?), Goofy answers the question of "who's driving" the car - and more importantly to them, the eponymous trailer - up the precipice with a resounding, if not too reassuring, answer that he - after all - is the man behind the steering wheel. One quick glance, and the accompanying and more infinitely important internal observation that this cannot be the case, and the social convention that lies at the core of the plot of Mickey's Trailer, is all in tatters, and all that is left is the long and painful plummet back to the restoration of normalcy, post-crisis. (Spoiler: The mouse and duck survive unblemished, although other res within the trailer unimportant to the next instalment does not.) 

Goofy's short reign as führer of the trailer and all within, as the viewers even of the ultra-cut edition airing Christmas Eve on Sweden's Channel 1 (still, or should I say without further cuts) would know, is soon re-established and lost yet again despite his desperate efforts, meaning because of them, and 

Who, then, governs this collection of city-states (New York, Rhode Island, frankly Massachusetts) and peasant republics in the Jeffersonian mold, add latifundia dominated by wealthy landowners, and from whence doth this authority, once vested in the federal (as opposed to a confederal, a notion later resurrected) government? Well, apart from the congress disliked to the point of a sixty-percent turnout (during "presidential" Novembers) seeming unfathomable, and betraying a no small amount of disdain and ick going into the ballot box, and the court once revered... mayhaps... but going through a period of liberal excess, into a broadly libertarian guardrail - advancing varying conservative and liberal causes past the velvet rope of said ballot box - into a conservative resurgence either purveying the process of said ballot against judicial overhaul, or the gavel-enforced long-term, but never sufficiently close desire of a Gilead from sea to shining sea (although sparing Catholics, Jews, gays with knots tied, Kanye and Tim and Larry and many others, under the aegis of a seeming non-believer twice divorced and unable to quote scripture, as compared to Atwood's autocratic, genocidal, puritanical, seemingly both collegial and austere Calvinist dysoutopia of New England Talibanism), the presidency has been unhealthily in the focus of the dreams, desires and above all disdains of critics and lovers within this fifth, or sixth party system, with increasing desire for the excesses of power exercised within, and to capture, this office in a most tribal fashion. This trend, and strife, began perhaps - and ignoring the very special and sordid case of Mr. Johnson, and his usually hapless successors - with the impeachment procedure against the liar and cheat Clinton ("president", lest I offend someone else) partly as an attempt to rein in the powers of an office understandably, if not necessarily, expanded to meet the demands of an ever-expanding empire, from the days of firing at Spaniards in order for the talons to embrace Cuba to Trump promising, in phlegm if not in substance, to turn bullets against hapless immigrants speaking the same language (and others reminiscent also of that era, to whose ancestors President McKinley brought the benefits and bayonets of liberty, now to behold his successor decrying proverbial chickens) to so very defensively "hold the border"? (Note, about the not-so-often-pronounced, but ever-present Hitler analogy, the absence of calls for a German-Polish border wall, which to Nazi troops would genially, if not ferociously, have been the foremost object slated for complete annihilation.) 

Who, then, governs this empire? In the garniture, or garnish, adoring his plate there are the usual suspects: The military, police and security apparatus, equally cancerous in its growth (if perhaps beneficially) to feed various, well, conspiracy theorists varyingly on left and right, and the secretaries having previously . Previously, from the objective hindsight of time, we may decry the likes of Stanton, Daugherty and of course Dulles (need I say which brother, or proclaim through your absence of doubt that we are both a "conspiracy-lover/hater" too?) have exerted tremendous power . If that is enough, throw in the name Hoover, and know I speak not of the philantropist and second nonagenarian to have held the supreme office, but the one he served so briefly under. 

The Decline of Empire

The times, as the poet and laureate had it, are a-changing, and nobody - least of all those most fervently declining the proposition - seem to hold against the fact that as a relative, the United States seems less and less the predominant power, and as an absolut, its might may wane as well. 

But consider then two facts, which should be held against such a development. First, the (again, take naught for granted) inevitable decline of the Chinese empire, or the last in a series of installments inevitably, perhaps unenviably, followed by another. At any rate, the debate and scepticism on the long-term durability of Chinese growth under the red yoke (or while tethered behind it) and the . Second, as a sub-point to this, the opposite growth of the American population, both "natively", and through its continued consumption (some would say naively) of labour forces skilled and merely eager, in spite of existing immigration frameworks. 

Breathing Nitrogen. Full stop.

 

Cross-Atlantic travel via Zeppeliner ended, ignominiously, with the spark, or the assumption of a spark whose existence now as theoretical as quantum events, and the merry joining of nitrogen and oxygen - that great harbinger of life - against a bright Jersey sky. 

The efforts for many years, which repeat with a number of decades between, to find a more tolerable or "humane" method of execution this weekend kicked into gear with Alabama's final call, in this call which never seems to reach finality until curves, as well as bodies, have been flatlined, to end the life of 35-year-in-wait Kenneth Smith by means of oxygen deprivation, as it might well be called rather than the seemingly more sinister nitrogen asphyxiation, putting emphasis on the substance which, while not toxic, best not be enjoyed with 100 % purity (as so many things). 

This effort, to find the medicalised, painless death . In Utah, the longstanding preference for blood - the cleaver, or the bullet, compromised by the quotidian hanging, but only as an option - was rekindled with the medical profession's unwillingness , and the decidedly inhumane, but questionably in-