The Daily Minutiae

To start out, when I heard Israel was attacking Gaza again, I was disappointed.  When I heard how aggressively they were attacking and about the politics behind the newest campaign, I wasn't exactly supporting the Jews like I felt I should.  It almost feels like a loveless marriage between us and the Israelis.

Then I realized how well-reported Israel is.  We almost know more about what the Israeli military's doing more than our own, daily casualty reports of combatants and civilians alike.  And all with limited press access into Gaza.

This took me back to Gandhi's method of protesting, which preached "Media exposure, media exposure, media exposure," the very method millions of Americans can trace their civil rights to.

As I previously mentioned military casualties in the current "situation" going on in Gaza are staggeringly in favor of the already much larger Israeli army.  And the Israelis have evolved.  With U.S. smartbombs, the Israelis are bombing Hamas targets and leaving relatively few innocent civilians dead, all things considered.

What I think is, is that Israel is redefining how to fight a war.  By and large, the age of world wars and front-line battling may be on its way out.  With nuclear weapons and bigger and bigger conventional bombs --not to mention ever-bubbling global interdependency-- it would seem unpractical, a waste of resources, to wage an all-out war between two world powers.

So war changes to a policing operation where one side is bad and broke the law and the other side punishes them.  Media has become its own front, and the attacking government makes up a kind of (making up a new term here) neo-propaganda, which is nothing more than good PR.  Every successful PR worker will tell you the best way to look good is do good thing (smartbombs) and be transparent, like having a YouTube channel or a blog.

Ideally, Israel would make a really smart bomb that wiped out only Hamas militants all in one blast, but for now they have to make due with their sloppy, but well-planned media strategy.

So many people are doom and gloom about journalism these days, but I'm optimistic.  There will always be a place for journalists as long as there's strife and human rights involved.

-Alexei Barrionuevo

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/world/americas/13chile.html

Chile's Sexual Awakening

-photos by Tomas Munita

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/09/09/world/20080913CHILE_index.html?ref=americas

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For me, this article echoes memories of Craig.  "Craig" was the name we had given to the Chilean exchange student our senior year, for what reason, I'm not sure.  He just looked like a Craig, though I argued Kenneth.

Before Craig's suave, misogynist aura offended his first host family the last time, the predominately-female household ate him up.  He was everything a small-town Ohio girl would want from a South American exchange student: ever-bronze skin, good eyes, kind of tall, aloof most of the time.  Him and I had grown close and he confided that his father back home owned a perfume store so he always smelled as some put it "scrumptious."

For an exchange student, Craig was a young gun.  If I remember, we took him out for wings for his birthday, and I'm pretty sure he turned 17 then.

His age wasn't flushed out until he started talking to my alumnus friend Mara.  At the time Mara was 19 and took Craig to be like the rest of the exchange students and out of high school already.

Craig thought he was really bad:

She walked away.  "I've got her in ...  hmm ... how is said ... ah, bolsillo?"

"Pocket, Craig?" I asked.

"Yeeah.  I've got her in my pahkett," and he punctuated with a smirk.

"You like how that sounds, huh?"

"Yeeah," he belched.

He went with her after whatever function it was we were at and I let him go.  In the week that followed, I had to cover for Craig because his family had a grudge with Mara and wouldn't let their supposed young love blossom.

Then by the next weekend Mara had some words for me.  Craig was starting to creep her out and "court" her.  Yes, she used "court."  He would kiss her hand and try numb-nuttedly to smooch her.  She wasn't very happy about not mentioning how young he was.

Reading this article and looking at those pictures, I can't help but wonder where Craig is and what kind of obscene shock he's gone through.  It wouldn't take much to get ahold him --just a few clicks and a Facebook message-- but I can't help but wonder what he would say if I said I wanted to visit sometime. 

I can see the response now, just like the one my Bolivian friend's already given me, "You need to get your butt down here.  I can get you all the girls and ... you can't believe it, man!"

-"Letterbomb," Green Day

-"Nicaragua, Nicaragüita," Carlos Mejía Godoy

"[The guerilla fighter] will also make use of what he learns as the months or years of the war strengthen his revolutionary convictions, making him more radical as the potency of arms is demonstrated, as the outlook of the inhabitants becomes a part of his spirit and of his own life..."

-Guerilla Warfare, Ernesto "Che" Guevara

I've seen kids walking around campus lately wearing Che Guevara t-shirts.  Right there, superimposed on solid red, that infamous face.  After finally seeing The Motorcycle Diaries, I questioned one of the students what they thought about the movie or if they'd read the book.  The gist of the reply was, "No.  Uhh, what's that?  Oh, no.  Che's just a cool dude."

A cool dude, I could go with that I guess.  It struck me odd that so many people were so ignorant about what they were so openly celebrating, but that happens.

The truth is, things are a lot different from Che's time.  The Latin American revolutionary hero has since faded away.  There are no ideological revolutions and upheavals, only a few diagnosed terrorist groups, just as many unhappy people as there were before, and millions more Che Guevara t-shirts.

Che's political reform was a kind of militant humanism which took every man into account and used them as tools for common good.

Compare that to FARC, the biggest thorn in the side of Colombia's government and probably the largest terrorist group in the Spanish-speaking world.  FARC was once the military wing of the Colombian communist party, but then turned to ransom and drug trafficking to fund themselves among other ways.  

Nowadays, FARC has very little political if any.  They resort to car bombing and kidnappings to flex their muscle.  One of the most interesting things I found in Guerilla Warfare is that Che wasn't in favor of terrorism and thought armed uprisings were last resorts.  He writes early in the book: "It is necessary to distinguish between sabotage, a revolutionary and highly effective method of warfare, and terrorism, a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution."

Most of the book isn't written like this.  The majority of it is tried and true ways to start a guerilla unit, not anything page-turning.  What's more interesting is the fact he sounds like a broken record, which shows how common sense combat was to him.  He was a pure revolutionary.

So what I want to know is, how did Guevara's armed humanism get perverted into terrorism and drug trafficking?