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News of summer – not always sunny

Thursday, May 27, 2010

“SUMER IS I-CUMEN IN!” … if I may quote the Middle English words of the oldest known six-voice “round”, sung during the 13th Century and captured - probably in Oxford around 1260 - on the pages of a renowned manuscript (left).

The document’s likely original owner, a music-loving monk called William of Wynchcombe, is also noted for being hauled before the Bishop of Hereford and charged with “incontinence” (which obviously didn’t mean then what it means now) with various women, including a nun.

But what of today’s summer coming in? My home-town’s paper specializing in gossip about the rich and famous (no, not the Wall Street Journal – rather the pink-tinted New York Observer) has naturally turned its beady gaze, for its issue dated for Memorial Day, to that supposedly halcyon playground, the Hamptons. But in a real indicator of our tawdry times, what its front-page is trumpeting is news of the biggest-ever anti-drugs drive by law-enforcement agencies on the east end of Long Island.

The paper’s main and sidebar headlines, DRUGHAMPTON and HEROIN AND THE HAMPTONS were evidently too neat to resist, and its reporter Chloe Malle (you can’t get away from the celebrity world in the Observer, for even the Crime Blotter beat is patrolled by the offspring of Candice Bergen and the late Louis Malle) got a quote from Southampton’s Town Supervisor that seemed designed to suit the news editor’s calendar-planning.

 

Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst praised a police swoop that netted 20 arrests and many packages of narcotics street-valued at $3 million, saying: “The timing was such that we could make the bust pre-empting the beginning of the summer season”.

 

 

 

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SUMMER DOWN SOUTH can, we know, offer great contrasts with the North East. Fahrenheit temperatures and humidity percentages were both at 94 in Jackson, Mississippi when the combined memorial service was finally held for the 11 oil-workers killed in the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion of April 20th.

The rig’s owner, Transocean chose sweltering Jackson as the event’s location because of its convenient location for families of the dead. And it was as if the media suddenly woke up to an obvious fact. For all the concentration on the huge and dire results of this drilling disaster, measured in enormous numbers (like the hundreds of thousands of barrels-worth of oil spewing from the ruptured seabed well, and the outflow reported to be affecting 54,000 square-miles of the Gulf) that one simple and easily-envisioned number eleven lies at the heart of it all.

Eleven men who just vanished, leaving no discernable remains; but of course they left behind eleven grieving families. And an extraordinary total of eleven hundred mourners filled the Jackson Convention Center to honor them – complete with a gospel choir and country-music artists.

There were strong constraints on camera access, but much mawkish media coverage came out of Jackson; and some was very respectful. National Public Radio, however, was notable for its forthrightness - in straightforwardly calling the lost workers “The Forgotten Eleven”.




OUR HEMISPHERE'S CONCEPT OF SUMMER is almost surreally mocked in Somalia, sitting as it does on the Equator. The coast, I recall, can be inhumanely humid, but inland it’s bone dry and the temperature will rarely if ever drop below 90 degrees - indeed it can hover around 120 throughout the months between June and September.

The New York Times this week revealed the official, but previously unacknowledged back-story to what’s going on in Somalia's inhospitable terrain. On its front page the Times trampled over a Pentagon rule, the restrictive document-stamp “LIMDIS” (meaning “limited distribution”) and distributed to all of us - unlimitedly - an “Execute Order” from last Fall, signed by General David Petraeus, who leads US Central Command. (Not that the paper made anything of the document’s security status; it just said, a tad smugly, that “a copy … was viewed by The New York Times”).

The directive (in full, a Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order) authorized US forces to undertake covert action in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa (including Somalia of course) in order to “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” Al Qaeda and its allied groups in those areas. We now can see how this led to a murky operation that THE MEDIA BEAT highlighted last October, when Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, Qaeda’s main liaison with the Somali militant movement Al Shabaab, was killed in a helicopter attack – since then believed to have been spearheaded by US Navy Seals.

Some of the covert US action is also aimed at exploiting increasingly violent divisions between Al Shabaab and other militant groups like Hizbul Islam. This entire inchoate landscape of conflict and disorder has led during May alone, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, to the further displacement of over 270,000 people from their homes (picture above right).

I have looked in vain for any American media outlet that’s drawing attention to these fast-worsening developments, but they mean that the year’s most unbearable months in Somalia are now beginning with nearly 2 million citizens (nearly one in five of the country’s population) living without a roof over their heads.

 

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