Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry From Africa”
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
“Waste no compassion on these separate dead!”
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.
Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
karan thapar takes lalit modi's case
for once in an interview he comes across as the MORE LIKEABLE GUY.
johann hari feels patronising compassion for ayn rand!
ilu johann, but you’re writing for a lame website and that makes this piece lame by association. but you never fall below a given value of good, so i recommend this piece to anyone interested in why rand works for some people.
does crowdsourcing devalue designers' work?
because apparently twitter paid six dollars for the birdie graphic when they started out. i wonder how much the failwhale cost.
the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”.
“fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as brazil, indonesia, and even parts of india—that people think of as teeming with children.”
haha, i love the economist’s spiel about being a totally agenda-free magazine. because that’s what “people” want, right, the sort of “people” who can only imagine what parts of the world filled with crawling masses of brown babies are like? anyway, report is pretty interesting.
that's completely unsurprising and completely fucking shocking all at once
wtf is this victorian london?
slate tries to be hard once again; fails miserably yet again
are we supposed to be impressed by this study and its findings - which we are learning about third-hand at best through this essay? arendt has always had extremely virulent and passionate critics who have described her as a self-hating jew. a couple of them may even have actually bothered to read her work, i’m sure.
her reportage has always been questioned and studied, and that in itself is a good thing. but the arguments for and against the ‘banality of evil’ in no way implicate arendt’s own thinking, since the phrase doesn’t even appear in eichmann except at the very end, in an evidently hastily-written conclusion. but i’m troubled by the rant against it that rosenbaum attempts in this piece nonetheless. weak; very weak. go read amos elon.
