Can we be more specific?
Thursday, July 17, 2008
THERE'S BEEN A MAINSTREAM media brouhaha, loud at least when compared with much overseas coverage, about moves in the International Criminal Court at The Hague to apply the full force of law to the horrors of Darfur.
Armchair critics have been complaining about the Court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Campo getting down to the nitty-gritty, and going for an arrest warrant against Sudan's president Omar Hassan al-Bashir (far left) on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
With good cause, humanitarian groups on the ground and the joint peace-keeping force from the African Union and the United Nations are bracing themselves for reprisals from the offended Sudanese government. It's only wise to take precautions.
Not so justifiably, though, commentators in the West have been saying the warrant should never have been sought, since it "injects new volatility into the chaos of Darfur", to use one editor's typical summary-heading.
It appears that generalized condemnation of Sudan's appalling human rights abuses is okay, but taking actual, specific steps against a man who's individually responsible is not.
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INDIVIDUAL, SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITY LAY AT THE HEART of some legal theater this week, that was largely overlooked in general reportage.
Before a House of Representatives' Judiciary subcommittee devoted to the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Douglas Feith (pictured above center), the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and a lawyer by training, was confronted by an accuser, and tried to obfuscate - some would say brazenly lie - his way out of blame for creating the Bush Administration’s legal smokescreen surrounding the use of torture.
The blame came from British international lawyer Phillipe Sands, whose book “Torture Team” mounts a powerful case for the personal culpability of individual Bush staffers. He indicts the group who, with Feith pre-eminent among them, worked up a (dubious, of course) legal framework to justify “enhanced interrogation”, including the now all-too-familiar “waterboarding” technique for virtually drowning a detainee.
Though hedged about with some arcane procedural shenanigans from Republican Congressmen, Tuesday’s drama drew extra significance from taking place against a backdrop of highly relevant news … the only detainee held on American soil, Ali al-Marri was judged by a US Court of Appeal to be entitled to challenge his detention (even while the court acknowledged the Administration’s right to order indefinite imprisonment) … Guantanamo prisoner Salim Hamdan gave evidence before a military hearing, ahead of being represented today before a federal judge in Washington on a constitutional rights question, about painful and humiliating maltreatment during his six years of imprisonment without trial … and Canadian lawyers released a video of their teenaged client Omar Khadr being interrogated in Gitmo.
On Capitol Hill an insistent Sands pressed his case against Feith & Co, quoting verbatim from his previous (thankfully tape-recorded) exchanges with the former Pentagon aide, conducted while Sands was researching his book - particularly the moment when, with emphasis, Feith had dismissed the applicability of the Geneva Convention on humane treatment of prisoners:
“The al Qaeda people were not entitled to have the Convention applied at all. Period. Obvious.”
Sands brought up this direct and specific quotation - he had to - after Feith had preposterously claimed to the Committee:
“I strongly championed a policy of respect for Geneva.”
Incidentally, Feith had earlier refused to appear if the hearing also included Larry Wilkerson, who was chief of Staff to Colin Powell at the State Department (both ex-Army men, of course). Back in April Wilkerson gave an interview to Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, warning that Feith and the team would be wise to confine any future foreign trips to strongly sympathetic, US-allied countries. He said they:
“... should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."
That court at The Hague could well end up with a very full docket.
LIKE THE GOOD MULTIMEDIA CONSUMER that I am, I went shopping online the other day -- for one of those simple, if somewhat old-style, items of clothing ... a tie.
It turned into a nightmare.
Instead of a carefree experience that would refreshingly contrast with that awful sense of being overwhelmed by vastness when I’m in a physical big-box store like Walmart, Ikea or The Home Depot, I instead got, not freedom, but just more of that same megastore misery.
Online I got lost, I circled round several times and saw more and more of the same product that I didn’t want, again and again, before retreating in defeat.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that in the zone of cyberspace where customers who are searching digitally can meet marketers who are digitally promoting their wares, it would be really easy for a good match to occur? Not at all, as many of us know.
It made me long for the good old-fashioned pleasure of a leisurely drop-in on Emmett of Jermyn Street in London’s St James’s district. There you comfortably survey gentlemen’s ties (yes, they still call them that, at least in Jermyn Street) on polished mahogany and brass shelves, and a natty expert directs you to exactly what you want - or need, which of course the expert is better at knowing.
Well, online relief for my (and many others’) frustration is at hand. Aptly, it comes in a form rather like Emmett of Jermyn Street. Or rather - in this age of multi-everything - in the form of many, many Emmetts of Jermyn Street.
UNDER THE NAME OF MICROSHOPS.COM, THOSE SMART innovators at the Silicon Alley New York web design company ECommerce Partners (who, I should disclose, designed and operate THE MEDIA BEAT, as well as many other more corporate, name-branded websites, including CNN’s health-related information services, L'Oreal Technique haircare and Perry Ellis clothing) are launching a remarkable conglomeration of niche online stores.
The initiative is led by ECP’s co-founding partner Asi Erenberg, who emphasized to me that the distinctiveness of the new service lies in the tightness of its focus.
Search engines (and of course these days we mainly mean Google) pretty well rule our online lives, but as they make their algorithmic fast-crawl through the universe of websites, they can only bring back to a searcher what’s there on the basis of a name that appears to match (most closely, at least) the searcher’s own chosen search-term or keyword.
Success for the store-owner lies largely in having the right name for the crawler to catch. So Microshops.com offers a powerfully huge array of very tightly-focused names. For now they run mainly among very particular products chosen for their appeal to young metropolitan nesters like baby blankets or personalized baby shoes (something I see a lot of on the Upper West Side of Manhattan)
Microshops.com's plans include expansion into the market for dog accessories -- with a similar degree of specificity. Even within the range of dog bedding stores, there are refined distinctions to be made between, for instance, SmallDogBed.com, Large-Dog-Bed.com (whose hard-to-resist mascot is pictured above right), OutdoorDogBeds.com, FancyDogBeds.com and more.
The customer who knows exactly what she or he wants (and of course we mostly do) runs very little risk of ending up in the wrong store.
SAY I'M PART OF A YOUNG COUPLE, AND FOR OUR NEW baby or baby-to-come I want something in which to cradle him/her with me as I go about my day, visiting Starbucks and doing the grocery shopping. I’m also savvy enough a consumer that I know I want to try a sling, rather just any old kind of carrier or harness.
The absolutely correct online store is there waiting for me -- Babysling.com, a shop totally dedicated to the baby sling and associated accessories. When the search engine - which of course identifies it fast and puts it at the top of my first results page - takes me there, I find a choice of seven different manufactured brands of sling (and that was something of a surprise to the real me) and almost endless variations in styles, all subtly or substantially different.
The end result in every shopping category that Microshops.com offers is that a customer, says Erenberg, “is never more than two clicks away from a purchase” - which of course is nothing less than the Holy Grail to marketers everywhere.
ERENBERG'S STRATEGY HAS DEVELOPED OUT OF A DECADE spent in internet commerce, but he also has an appealing sense of some deeper and wider social history. For him the project, quite apart from its high potential for consistent business success, harks back to a well-recorded cultural phenomenon. “It’s like,” he says, “when our forefathers had names that described their jobs, for instance Goldsmith, Baker or Butcher. You would know, just from their name, exactly what you could buy from them”.
He may be on to something, seeing the name game as a pointer to a future of closer relationships once again between label and function. His historical reference reminded me of encountering one curious name while reporting once in Bangladesh. It evidently dated back to British colonial rule, when a family’s antecedents must have held a minor clerking job in some Raj accounts department.
The name was Pettycashwallah - which nowadays could even work as a distinctive webname.