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August 21, 2012
In
Moscow, a hundred-year moratorium was placed on gay-pride parades, and
Judge Marina Syrova sentenced members of the punk band Pussy Riot to two
years in a prison camp for felony hooliganism related to an impromptu
anti-Putin performance at a Russian Orthodox cathedral in February.
Before delivering her verdict, Syrova read aloud from a court
psychiatrist’s evaluation of the band’s leader, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova,
whom the doctor had diagnosed with an affliction he identified as
“mixed-personality disorder” and characterized as involving
stubbornness, “inflated self-esteem,” and a “proactive approach to
life.” Upon hearing their sentence, the members of the band laughed.
Pro-Pussy Riot demonstrators outside the Russian consulate in Marseille
were arrested for wearing balaclavas. “Absurd!” said the protesters.
“Ridiculous!” Police killed 34 workers on strike from a platinum mine in
Marikana, South Africa. “We are aware,” said an officer of the
London-based company that owns the mine, “that it will take some time
for some trust to be regained.” Elderly women in Swaziland were growing
Swazi Gold, a potent variety of marijuana. “If you grow corn or
cabbages,” said one grandmother, “the baboons steal them.” Muslims
celebrated the end of Ramadan. Revelers in Mogadishu fired guns in the
air to mark the city’s first peaceful Eid al-Fitr in years, while in
Damascus, Bashar al-Assad emerged from hiding to pray at the Rihab
al-Hamad mosque next to his palace. The United Nations observer mission
in Syria ended with heavy fighting still taking place around the
country. Afghanistan’s education ministry approved a new history
curriculum that largely omits the coups and Soviet invasion of the
1970s, the rise of the Taliban, and the American invasion after 9/11.
“It is as if someone is trying,” said an Afghan journalist, “to hide the
sun with two fingers.”
“Social welfare” nonprofits, which are
not required to disclose the names of any of their donors, were
reportedly spending more on TV ads in support of U.S. presidential
candidates than were super PACs, which are. “We can take corporate
money, personal money, cash, shekels, whatever you got,” said the
director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Senate candidate Todd Akin
(R., Mo.) defended his categorical opposition to abortion. “If it’s a
legitimate rape,” Akin explained, “the female body has ways to try to
shut that whole thing down.” Vice President Joe Biden, addressing a
predominantly African-American crowd, spoke of Mitt Romney’s desire to
deregulate Wall Street. “They’re going to put y’all back in chains!”
said Biden. The Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters
Tournament, invited former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and
financier Darla Moore to become its first female members since it was
founded 80 years ago. The Iowa State Fair, at which vendors offered 57
types of food on a stick, concluded in Des Moines. “Fairs and carnivals
are roller coasters of stimulation,” said an overconsumption expert.
“Carnies understood this long before neuroscience did.” In Japan, where
the offspring of pale grass blue butterflies captured near Fukushima
were showing drastic mutations of their antennae, eyes, and wings, the
country’s “last ninja” spoke about the end of his kind. “Ninjas just
don’t fit into the modern day,” said Jinichi Kawakami, head of the Ban
clan. “We can’t try out murder or poisons.”
Pig-rearing squatters
were threatening the Nazca geoglyphs of Peru. A Belgian gynecologist
found that uterine length-to-width ratios in fertile women are nearly
golden, and American demographers announced that the U.S. population had
surpassed one hundred million times π. Particle physicists at the Large
Hadron Collider created a quark-gluon plasma with a temperature of 9.9
trillion degrees Fahrenheit, and astronomers observed that the sun is
very round. Researchers discovered that the black hole at the center of
the Phoenix galaxy cluster, unlike the black hole at the center of the
Perseus galaxy cluster, was not emitting a B-flat fifty-seven octaves
below middle C. “There are times,” said one astrophysicist, “when the
music essentially stops.” Crickets raised amid silence were found to be
more aggressive than those raised amid song. Caraquenians in red
trousers called for the return of Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Trousers, and Niçois defended the purity of the salade niçoise.
“Lemon and shallots, no, no!” said one woman. “I refuse any gastronomic
fundamentalism,” said a local chef. In Wales, National Health Service
officials expressed concern about inappropriate emergency calls from
sufferers of hamster bites and hangovers, and from a man who needed help
spreading ointment on his back. Queen Elizabeth II’s corgis, Holly,
Monty, and Willow, and her dorgis, Candy, Cider, and Vulcan, attacked
Princess Margaret’s Norfolk terrier Max at Balmoral Castle.
“Unfortunately the dog boy lost control,” said a witness. “There was
blood everywhere.”
—Anthony Lydgate
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Sources are footnoted at the permanent URL for this column:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/08/hbc-90008781 |
Letter
It’s
a small point, but “immolation” means sacrifice, not setting something
on fire. Which may make it appropriate to use the term “self-immolate”
(Weekly Review, August 14)
when describing a public suicide to make a political or religious
point—but which should not be used solely for those who set themselves
on fire. Why not use the English words for what you’re really
describing, which is someone setting himself or herself on fire?
All of this offered up in memory of my Latin teacher, Corinne Rosebrook, who made these points to me more than forty years ago.
Henry M. Willis
Los Angeles |
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