Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright on Global Foreign Policy and the 2016 Election10/16/2015
In gauging the place of America on the world's stage Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State during the Clinton administration, pressed strongly for, "diplomacy with world powers" rather than solely "chest thumping" military intervention. She held the Bush administration before the audience with an angry sense of disdain, and described the administration's work as, reckless. Albright came to the United States in 1948, and her eyes would light up in describing the world of her youth under Harry Truman. Currently, she greatly supports the work of the Center for American Progress in Washington D.C., where her speech was held. She describes it as, "an institution that is meant to keep America strong and just." And that the purpose is the same as when it was created in 2003: "to bring Americans together on behalf of our policies." She says that though there are partisan lines, personal friendships between Republicans and Democrats are possible for she was friends with the late Jesse Helms, and though they, "disagreed on pretty much everything grew to trust and respect each other." There was an overhead view that the Bush administration greatly damaged the world's perception of the United States and there is now a growing skepticism of U.S. involvement in other country's affairs. She drew back to the days of Presidents Harry Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt and encouraged that others wanting to be progressives should look toward the framework of their policies as guidance for the future. "President Obama," she went on to say, "inherited an incredible mess." She credited Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton with restoring diplomacy and on a broader level sanctioned, "people to people ties in global engagements." She turned back to, "the Iraq effect," which she states created, "the creeping sense that America can do little in the world." And that proper use of "economics must be upheld," in foreign policy. Albright continued with speaking about her more personal moments and how she remembers the date of August 7th, 1998 as the most harrowing of her career, because it was the day attacks on the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 122 people and injured 5,000. She recalls accompanying the bodies of 10 of her colleagues over the Atlantic ocean for a ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base. And in what seemed to be an indirect reference in creating adequate policies to react to attacks on American soil, Albright referred to Truman, saying that he, "never hesitated to defend America but he also...had the wisdom to lead in a way that attracted international support. He was determined to create a world where rules have real meaning." For the 2016 election Albright thinks we must learn from the past, and "show the country we can lead with intelligence, conviction and strength." She warned against demagoguery and in answer to an audience question said, "there is no way to exist in the 21st Century without a multilateral approach," to foreign policy and politics. By Sarah Bahl Wild Swans, the novel published in 1991, traverses an incredibly wide array of detail in the telling of the lives for four generations of women in China. Written by Jung Chang, it is a narrative recording of her family's history on her mother's side and gives detailed credence to the cultural underpinnings of the time belonging to each woman. Chang begins with her great-grandmother, who came from a family of tanners and who was married, at the age of twenty to a boy six years younger. She was named, "Number Two Girl," which was a normal type of name for millions of Chinese girls at the time. Young females from non-wealthy nor intellectual families were simply not given names. Number Two Girl was expected to raise her husband who was an only son and the family's treasure. His was a family of felt-makers, whose women sacrificed their eyes and overall health by taking in extra sewing for local tailors and dressmakers, working late into the night they would turn their oil lamps down to the minimum. But, he did go to a good school and passed examinations to become a Mandarin, which was a type of government official. For, "Without power or money, no Chinese could feel safe from the depredations of officialdom or random violence. There had never been a proper legal system. Justice was arbitrary and cruelty was both institutionalized and capricious. An official with power was the law. Becoming a mandarin was the only way a child of a non-noble family could escape this cycle of injustice and fear." His first child came when he was 15 years old, as Chang's grandmother was born, "on the fifth day of the fifth moon, in early summer 1909." The baby was given a step up in the world as she "was actually given a name," which was Yu-Fang. Yu was the generational name throughout China and it means, jade. Fang was the independent part of her name and it means, fragrant flowers. Yu-Fang was a child in a precarious world, without centralized government and encroaching Japanese powers in Manchuria. She was also to become among the last of women throughout China to have her feet bound. Her older sister escaped the torment, that she suffered as her feet were broken with blocks when she was two and wrapped to form, "three-inch golden lilies," that were considered ideal for women who were to be respected in society. Perhaps the look of a tottering lady brought a sort of allure to withhold any male watchers, but the reality was also that their broken feet would try to regrow at any chance once unwrapped and so had to remain restrained constantly in order to keep the effect. They also stank once uncovered as the toenails would grow into the sole and the unnatural morphing of the flesh would cause the foot to rot. The mother-in-law of a young bride would often lift up the edges of a dress to see the young woman's feet, and if they were more than about four inches, she would throw down the skirt in obvious scorn and leave, so that the bride would be left to face the contempt of guests and their mean spirited muttering amongst each other. Despite the pain she suffered, Yu-Fang consistently retained a good nature throughout her life and she was a beauty. "She had an oval face, with rosy cheeks and lustrous skin. Her long, shiny black hair was woven into a thick plait reaching down to her waist. She could be demure when the occasion demanded, which was most of the time, but underneath her composed exterior she was bursting with suppressed energy. She was petite, about five feet three inches, with a slender figure and sloping shoulders, which were considered the ideal." Her beauty was also considered a main asset by her father, who nearly bankrupted himself orchestrating meetings between his daughter and a warlord general. But his bet paid off as the general was quite taken by the elegance of the rural girl and asked her father to have her as his concubine which included an elaborate wedding ceremony and gifts for the bride's family that would enable the father to take concubines for himself, which he had wanted for a long time. For Yu-Fang, suicide would be the only way to say: no. The wedding was held, with great ceremony for the whole village to see. She tried to love her husband though she knew she was not his only wife. He stayed with her for a short while and she played music for him and massaged his feet. Though, he left not many weeks after their wedding, but not without telling her a tale of what happened to one of his concubines who cheated on him. She was bound and gagged, then raw alcohol was soaked into the cloth that was stuck in her mouth so that she slowly choked to death. Her lover was merely and mercifully shot. He came back six years after he left and upon their second union Chang's mother was conceived. The world of feudal finery was soon to be lost to the stark ravages of communism after the Kuomintang lost power. Both of Chang's parents were high communist officials but this did not mean they were not to suffer incredibly under the veil of Mao, who lead the country in a truly bizarre form of mass delusion. The wide spread financial system turned from one based on agriculture and essentially tribal exchanges of wealth that trickled down throughout the classes, to a vastly implemented command economy with nonsensical outputs. Under Mao, the entirety of China was supposed to be this miracle country all the time. Crops were planted from one field to another, to produce doubled and tripled, "miracle harvests" to show to officials so that there would not be negative repercussions for the working peasants. Though the transplanted crop would die fairly quickly as did millions of people throughout the vast nation, from starvation and over-work related illnesses. There was no clean medical system for decades and medicines were in constantly short supply. The grandmother, Yu-Fang, had all but a few pieces of her jewelry stolen because it, according to officials, belonged to the people. And when she grew sick and her grandchildren took her to the hospital there was no method by which to diagnose her much less treat her. Her suffering was not unique. Education was scorned and communism was a bullying system where people like Chang's mother, who were elegantly mannered and unusually well educated, were beaten down consistently for having more than other people. Instead of there being a system where every person has access to a reasonable quality of life, it was literally considered that all people were created equally and anyone with more owed everyone else. Chang's father suffered considerably trying to protect his family under such unbelievably violent and ridiculous circumstances. Both her parents were unusually intelligent and fostered education within their children. Chang, herself after working a series of seemingly unrelated positions including being a sort of doctor (she was told to treat people after being given a single manual to read) and a peasant, eventually won a scholarship to study outside of China. "I have made London my home. For ten years, I avoided thinking about the China I had left behind. Then in 1988, my mother came to England to visit me. For the first time, she told me the story of her life and that of my grandmother." By Sarah Bahl By Jean Craighead George encompasses the circular nature of survival and reveals how much humankind needs the earth by portraying a single girl, Miyax, whose personal life falls apart and who then befriends a wolfpack to become a member of their family by learning how to communicate with them in her own manner in ways they will understand. Miyax is 13 and has run away from a child marriage to a boy named Daniel who seems to have a borderline IQ or some sort of mental difference. He is described as "dull" but Miyax still finds a fair enough home with him and his family at first, as she learns to sew professionally and enjoys school. The tourists need parkas to survive the winter, ones made by Eskimos as their store bought jackets are usually never enough for Alaskan winters. But then Daniel begins to expect sex from Julie as he is teased for not really being married to his wife. This scares the girl and she runs away with the hope of reaching San Francisco. Long before her marriage to Daniel, Julie had been told by her stepmother, Martha that her father was dead, that he and his kayak went into the sea and only broken pieces of the vessel were ever found. When life became unbearable with her stepmother, the young teenager began to view marriage as a way out for her father told her she could marry Daniel, who she had never met and knew nothing about. There is no high school in Mekoryuk and Martha could not afford to send Julie to the mainland to further the girl's education. Miyax began to wonder that if she wed Daniel, perhaps the boy's father, Naka would send her to school. It is hard to believe that the matter was decided by the Head of the Indian Affairs in Mekoryuk, who says, " 'You are now thirteen and I have in my files an agreement for this arrangement signed by Kapugen and Naka.' " The circumstances seem impossible that such a marriage would take place in the 1950s or 1960s, much less that the head of Indian Affairs would insist on it based on paperwork signed by the children's fathers. Perhaps this did happen though. Transportation is paid for and provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to take Miyax from the port in Mekoryuk, and after a couple of transfers to Barrow. George is mocking of the gussak's sensibilities toward the Eskimo and nature as the airline pilot describes the world below: " ' The Arctic Research Laboratory, where scientists study the Arctic. People from all over the world come here to investigate the top of the world. We now know a lot about living in the cold.' " I doubt few things sound more stupid to an Eskimo than a laboratory building built to study how to live in the cold. Overall, with alcoholism and child marriage at the forefront of problems in Julie's world, it cannot be said that the Eskimos are portrayed well. Julie's best family situation is among the wolves, after she runs away from Daniel. But her favorite, Amaroq, the leader of the pack and her adopted father, is gunned down by gussak shooters for their own sense of random amusement. The shooting from the air darkens Miyax's world and she no longer wishes to go to San Francisco, where Amy, her pen pal lives. She finds her father alive and with a new partner named Ellen, but she runs away again as the father's Westernized lifestyle reminds her too much of the blood behind it all. Julie is a byproduct of a dying world that seems to have trouble economically assimilating within the culture that was raped of its independence many years before. Julie is very pretty and intelligent, but perhaps her inability to make a home in the new modern world comes from the fact that she does not want to. By Sarah Bahl I remember as a little girl, living in the Gambia, being with a group of school children to listen to a talk about chimpanzees from a woman, with straight, thin, silvered blond hair and a low, soft comforting voice that told us about her love for and experience with her beloved primates, in calm and measured tones. She spoke of reintroducing captive chimpanzees to the wild and having to use pincers on their butts, to get them to sleep in trees, rather than on the ground. She feared a chimp would become too comfortable living on the ground and make itself prone to predation. I believe this woman was Jane Goodall.
This would have been likely within the same year as the death of Dian Fossey on December 26, 1985. My first personal contact with a non human primate was about the year 1987 when my family took our weekend trip to the islands off the coast of Guinea. An American-French couple had brought their chimpanzee with them. It was a juvenile and wore a diaper. (I am not going into the proper morality, nor scientific construct, if there is one, for keeping chimpanzees as pets at this moment.) I was standing on the beach, and was six years old at the time. The chimp had been made confused and ran along the golden-white sands screeching, and at that age, as now, I was tall. I was five feet by the age of eight. The chimp, ran up to me and wrapped all four appendages around my right leg. He looked about and screamed as if he wanted me to do something and I just looked down at him. He quieted for a moment, looked up into my face and froze with the thought, "Wait, you're not my mommy," written on his face. He then took off to find his real mommy, or so it seemed. I find it intriguing how Fossey's love for gorillas began before she knew them. She came to Africa in September 1963, with two of her main goals being, "to visit the mountain gorillas of Mt. Mikeno in the Congo and to meet Louis and Mary Leaky at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Both wishes came true." For her, in her first encounter, "Sound preceded sight. Odor preceded sound in the form of an overwhelming musky-barnyard human-like scent. The air was suddenly rent by a high-pitched series of screams followed by the rhythmic rondo of sharp pok-pok chest beats from a great silverback male obscured behind what seemed an impenetrable wall of vegetation." I will never fail to be amazed at the trust Fossey has in approaching animals who are so much stronger and seem weary of human contact. But she did. In the black and white photos of my 2000 Mariner Books edition, it is amazing how submissive her movements and mannerisms toward these creatures are. She is saying, "It is your world, but may I be so bold as to be your guest?" The gorillas said, "yes." And so came nineteen years of a life solely devoted to a specie, of two hundred and forty mountain gorillas, that has a singular home of twenty-five miles long and varies in width from six to twelve miles, upon "six extinct mountains within the Virunga Volcanoes." And I would prefer to go by the book version of the story rather than the film on this take. Despite breathtaking shots of Sigourney Weaver as Fossey among the gorillas, the film portrays the scientist as a renegade loser who begged Leakey to work with gorillas because she was used to being around disabled children. Fossey served for eleven years as an occupational therapist and her background did consist of a majority of science courses at the university level, before she began work with gorillas. The film is in part based on, "the work by Dian Fossey," and "the article by Harold T.P. Hayes" who later wrote the novel, The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey. The Gorillas in the Mist novel is based on extensive field notes and perceptions about four main gorilla families. She depicts these creatures as having incredibly complex and intense family bonds formulated under the control of silverback leaders who she named Whinny (Group 4) Beethoven (Group 5), Rafiki (Group 8) and Nunkie's Group, who she does not give a number to for some reason. Each gorilla is his or her own character within a story-frame of love, passion, lust, family bonds, incest, illness, infanticide and many hours spent grooming and playing. The average group consists of a single silverback, his harem of about three females, whose rank depends on order of capture by her mate for life, and their various offspring. When a male grows old enough he will go off from the group to secure his own females, usually by herding them away from their original groups. Violent fights will break out among the silverbacks in the acquiring of females. If she already has a child by another mate after having been newly obtained, the silverback will likely kill her offspring in order to dominate her and reproduce with her as quickly as possible himself. Despite that it cannot be said that they are "nice" these shy creatures will also willingly die by the multitude to protect a single one of their own, which is why capturing mountain gorillas for exhibition in zoos is so dangerous. The capturing of a single gorilla can involve corruption among various lines of both African and European officials. "Without any abashment whatsoever, the Conservator admitted to having asked the leading poacher of the park, Munyarukiko, to organize a group of poachers to make the capture. What money passed through whose hands at this point I do not now know, nor did I then care. The men had climbed Mt. Karisimbi and selected a random group containing an infant. Later I learned that ten members of the gorilla group were killed in the capture." And all of this was for the Cologne zoo. Fossey's novel does not run in an entirely linear fashion, but flows back and forth in time, though in a manner that functions well. The only criticism is not of the writing itself in a direct right, but of her portrayal of men she so often calls, "the Africans." She also refers to them as "the porters." Men who were essential to her maintaining her camp and who worked side by side with her for years to cut down trap after trap set by poachers as part of active conservation. She does not portray them badly nor does she portray them highly. Their name for her was Nyiramachabelli, which means: the women who lives on the mountain alone without a man. She seems a very hard driven person and perhaps is a little condescending to those who do not have her education nor innate love for gorillas. She also never goes into detail about the mysterious poachers who were natives of the land and knew the mountains at least as well and likely better than she. Little is known of the Africans and their culture outside of their very direct effects on the gorillas as well as a dry, scientific overview of the country of Rwanda at large. Research students were also hard placed to meet the competition that was a daily part of her world. Fossey came to realize she would need to train researchers to both aid in current work and carry it on for prosperity. Very, very few people are made to be able to transfer academic excellence into sustainable field work. One student collapsed at her feet after their first hike together. Another accidentally burnt down her own cabin from trying to dry clothes. A high ranked visiting botanist also burnt down his own cabin, leaving Fossey and the Africans with severe smoke inhalation from putting out the flames. It came to Fossey's realization that what was a wilderness heaven for her, would be crying spells for people who think they really want to study primates in the wild because they achieved good grades and have been camping a few times. The question of salary also comes up when it comes to researchers as Fossey herself was never once salaried for her work in the mountains. It is incredible what Fossey's passion, analysis and love for one specie meant for the world. "More than a decade later as I now sit writing these words at camp, the same stretch of alpine meadow is visible from my desk window. The sense of exhilaration I felt when viewing the heartland of the Virungas for the first time from those distant heights is as vivid now as though it had occurred only a short time ago. I have made my home among the mountain gorillas." By Sarah Bahl By Sandrine Bonnaire (2007) gives a multi-tiered view of mental differences and how some of those who need special care are treated by the medical system, their peers, family and caregivers. Sabine, is the protagonist, a woman who was found to be different from her siblings and in need of particular care at a young age. Sabine is autistic and as a 38 year old large figured adult, she sits on a couch of a special home where her head hangs to the side and her mouth stays open with a drool. She is asked by a caretaker if she would like to see the animals. She answers yes but asks that if she sees the animals will it mean she can't go gardening as well. It's a surprisingly well thought out response given her overall expression. Sabine enters a barn with a caretaker, pets a horse and feeds the animals as instructed. She drools fairly constantly and repeatedly asks to take a break. She is fatigued easily and seems fragile. The scene flips to Sandrine dancing with her sister, many years before. They both look to be in their early twenties. Sabine gazes at the camera, with one eye squinting. She can dance, read and write. She's also barely recognizable as a very thin, pretty girl in a patterned sweater awkwardly and adorably dancing with her father and sister. She was enrolled at school with her siblings, but the tormenting by her peers caused her to self mutilate and within three months she was out of school. She stayed at home with her mother until she was twenty seven. During those years with her family she was both creative and productive. She would make dolls, knit sweaters for the whole family, study English and Geography in her room for hours with books she bought with her own allowance money. Sandrine bought her a piano and with private instruction she was quickly playing advanced compositions by Schubert and Bach. She even composed her own piece, The Path of France The scenes change to Sabine in the garden and not so much gardening as lying down with her back on the grass and her eyes closed, her arms to the side and her legs straight out in front of her. Sabine does not want to move and once propped up by a good natured caretaker lies down again. She seems genuinely exhausted and all her movements are exceedingly sluggish. Somehow she makes it into the house as they are having lunch as a group. Sabine after a couple of forkfuls of food lets out a high pitched screech, twice. She wants to eat with Sandrine but can't as the latter is filming. The difference in Sabine's appearance came after her stay in a hospital when she began to spit and hit her mother. She gained sixty pounds in a few years, began to drool and despite large quantities of oral medication she still hits and spits at times. Sandrine expresses shock at the difference the stay in the hospital had on Sabine. The filmmaker also, by way of theme, questions the efficacy of the medications on the patients. Does it really help them lead more fulfilled lives or does it just make them more ill by depleting the natural intelligence and slowing down the patient? Would Sabine have become worse on her own, with or without medicines? These are questions that are left to the viewer to ponder, as there seems no perfect answer but the feeling that there must be a better way. It also makes one wonder, what of the patients whose families cannot afford such high end care as those in the film receive? Her name is Sabine connotes more from French as "Call Her Sabine." She is a person, a sibling and a friend. By Sarah Bahl |
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