Hemmed in by geography

I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment called Prisoners of Geography: ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics, by Tim Marshall. I think the subtitle is slightly overstated. 'Everything' isn't true, because some countries aren't included: Australia gets three brief mentions, and New Zealand one. Plainly our politics aren't global enough.

But what the book does tell you is fascinating. It brings a whole new light to so much world news, and some breadth to just who holds power in the world. And who doesn't.

For instance, Russia, which is a vast nation in terms of real estate, is in reality only a relatively small country, because so much of the area it covers isn't much good for human beings to live in (as anyone sent to Siberia will tell you). The Russia we mostly think of is a smallish area to the West.

Furthermore, there are considerable problems with Russia's location: it's far more landlocked than it would like to be. And that's what Marshall is discussing: countries are bound far more strongly by where they're physically placed on the earth than by many other considerations. If there's no real access to waterways, then that can be extremely inhibiting. A number of countries are completely landlocked. If there are mountain ranges on your borders, then this may be helpful in terms of stopping invaders, but it's also a nuisance when it comes to trying to get over the mountains yourself.

And it helps to have good neighbours. Many countries don't, and spend a great deal of time fighting those next door.

Marshall also points out how the 'countries' we know in the world at present are, in some cases, relatively new on the world map. They didn't exist in this form a couple of hundred years ago. The British are to blame for some of these changes (along with the French and other empire-building nations). For example, the Brits, once they'd done with their Empires, tended to make hasty decisions about who would live where after the Brits themselves had gone. India and Pakistan's problems stem in part from this. Pakistan is one of the youngest 'nations' in the world, because basically it didn't exist less than a hundred years ago. Bangladesh is ever younger.

The Brits also drew lines across vast swathes of the Arab world, causing some of the problems we know today - though not all of them. The Arab tribes have been at war with each other for centuries, in one way or another. But a somewhat laissez-faire approach to map-making has had some huge consequences for those living in the region. You wouldn't expect maps to change the way nations see themselves; maps, after all, are only pieces of paper. (Unless of course they're magic, as the map in my latest children's fantasy is.)

Marshall manages to get to the nub of different countries' problems in succinct ways, and leaves you with a clearer understanding of what's going on around you. While his thesis is that geography itself is partly to blame for much of the world's infighting, he also shows how the movement of peoples around that geography can have beneficial or disastrous effects on other people, ones who were there first, as it were.

Marshall's point about geography, of course, affects us all even at a micro level. I live on a hill, which affects how I get to the city retail areas which are mostly on the flat. But it does mean I have great views of the Harbour and sea. I'm unlikely to be flooded, because water runs off our property easily, unlike some of my fellow citizens in areas that have been reclaimed.

New Zealanders, for the most part, live on two relatively equally-sized islands (imaginatively-named by our forebears as North and South). The gap between these two islands is a nuisance for travellers. Either we have to fly from the South to the North or vice versa, or we have to spend a considerable time going over the Cook Strait, a choppy bit of water that isn't always kind to travellers.

The North Island is warmer, as you'd expect, and has more population in its bigger cities. But in spite of what North Islanders think, the South isn't that cold: Scotland is much colder in the winter; many cities in the USA have snow for months at a time. We here in Dunedin, for instance, are lucky to get it once a year.

So geography and weather make a difference, as Napoleon found to his cost when he lost thousands of his French soldiers to the Russian weather - as Hitler also did with his German troops. For all our sense that we live in a world of vast choice, the reality is that we're hemmed in considerably by geography...

Marshall's book is fairly up to date, but the world keeps changing. He extends his book's range on his website The What and the Why.

Assassin of the Tsar

We recently got a package DVD which includes ten movies - mostly from the 90s, I think - and have only watched a couple so far. Last night it was the turn of a strange movie called Assassin of the Tsar. Made in Russia by a Russian director and with a Russian cast and crew, it stars Malcolm McDowell who plays a psychiatric patient, Timofeyev, with his usual intense on-the-edge approach, and also plays a real-life person, Yurovsky, the man who, along with a number of 'comrades', murdered the Tsar and his family. The other main actor, Oleg Yankovskiy, a well-known actor in his native country, plays the new doctor at the asylum where McDowell has been hospitalised for many years, as well as the Tsar. Confused? You should be. 

Even for people who know the story of the assassination, and the botched assassination of the Tsar's father (which is also in the movie), I suspect this film would appear confusing. Timofeyev believes he is Yurovsky, and on a certain date each year (July 16th, if I remember rightly) a wound appears around his neck, a circle like that of a hangman's rope. On another date in August, he also shows extremes symptoms of a stomach problem. Both of these are somehow related to the assassinations. In due course the doctor takes on the role of the Tsar in order to try and treat Timofeyev, but in the process comes to see himself actually as the Tsar, and dies - though not by assassination. Why he comes to take on the Tsar's persona isn't adequately explained, except with a bit of psycho-babble. 

The scenes set in the past where the Bolsheviks are planning to kill the imperial family are full of tension. The scenes in the asylum seem random and unrelated to the rest of the movie, and the whole nonsense of the doctor dying makes no sense. Then there's the woman who's lost her child and who's waiting outside the residence where the Tsar and his family are confined. We have no idea what she has to do with the story. Some reviewers see the film as a kind of releasing of guilt of the Russians in modern USSR. I have no idea, and couldn't see the connection.

The film is in English, presumably with the Russian cast dubbed. Curiously, while they all have accents, McDowell for the most part doesn't. By all accounts there's a version in Russian in which McDowell is dubbed. The soundtrack is also odd: there's music playing a good deal of the time, the usual sort of music that accompanies any film, but it seems to be coming from another room, and is often quite faint.

How this film came to be made and how McDowell got involved in it isn't obvious. McDowell gives it his all, as you'd expect, and is worth watching. But beyond that the film makes too little sense to really engage an audience. 

The Kite Runner and My Wedding

Picked up a couple of movies on DVD from the Library this last week.  One was the New Zealand made, My Wedding and other secrets, and the other was The Kite Runner.  An interesting pair.  The NZ film knows exactly its limitations, and works to present a world that's very ordinary, down-to-earth and in no way more excessive than the reality - apart, perhaps, from the humour.  The other movie is big budget, filmed in some amazing locations, with hundreds of extras and plenty of CGI.  For all that, it remains a very human film, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Well, enjoyed may not be quite the right word; it terms of filmmaking it was enjoyable, in terms of content it was often heart-breaking and sometimes extremely grim.   Kite Runner, for all its big budget, isn't a big story in the sense of being a huge adventure.  The main characters are fairly ordinary, and none of the faces on the screen are particularly familiar.  It's primarily about family and how relationships fare in the midst of crises.  Khalid Abdalla, as the adult Amir, turns from being a young man who knows he's done an extremely cowardly act as a child, to being someone who can forgive himself because he finally acts bravely enough to overcome not only his own demons but some brutal men who see no hypocrisy in abusing children on one hand while stoning adulterous women on the other.  His childhood friend and also the son of his father's servant - he turns out to be his step-brother as well - has inner strength, but no power.    Well, no power in the sense of position or authority.  He certainly has resilience and integrity.

I had thought the story was based on the author's life, but it's actually fiction, which gives it a more effective resolution than a 'true' story might have done.  There are some very nasty moments in the movie; curiously, but perhaps typically, there's been more angst from Afghanistan about the rape of the servant boy by some bullies than about the stoning of the woman by much nastier bullies.  Life under the Soviet invaders has some brutal moments (during one of these, Amir's father shows what moral integrity and guts he has) but the Taliban regime is a worse one to be under: for example, something that seems almost farcical - the beard police - is actually vicious and murderous.

My Wedding is based on the director's life.  The film has its origins in a student documentary Chinese New Zealander Roseanne Liang made; this focused on her secret marriage to a white New Zealander, brought about by Liang's concerns that her family wouldn't accept the marriage.  The feature film, in general, takes a much more light-hearted look at the same material, fictionalizes some of it, gives it dramatic structure, and offers two first-class roles for the two leading characters.  Michelle Ang plays the movie version of Liang (who directed), and Matt Whelan plays her husband.  He's gangly and very tall; she's petite, and a ball of fire.  Both of these actors are so good in their roles, it's almost a disappointment to see the real life couple in one of the extras on the DVD.

The film has everything going for it: a good cast which includes two popular and very experienced Hong Kong actors, Kenneth Tsang and Pei-pei Cheng (she was Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The other actors are relatively unfamiliar but uniformly good (only Simon London as the poncy student co-producer of the documentary seemed not quite attuned to the movie's mood).

My Wedding is one of those wonderful small-scale comedies New Zealand seems at last to be producing without making its audience cringe (Secondhand Wedding was another). Highly recommended.

Exit Music

While we were touring around over the last couple of weeks, I dropped into a few secondhand bookshops (and one or two new book shops, as well).  In Picton, if I remember correctly, I found a very good secondhand bookshop and a proprietor happy to talk at length if I'd so desired.  He had a copy of Ian Rankin's Exit Music, originally intended to the the last in the Rebus series.  We had this on CD, but I'd never listened to it, so I got the trade paperback he had in stock.

Having just read the most recent Rebus book, Standing in Another Man's Grave, in which Rebus, although officially retired, is in no way devoid of his usual energy and insight, it was a bit odd to go back a step and see him preparing for imminent retirement.  Like the latest book, hinges on a huge red herring, though in saying that, the red herring here is actually a vital part of how the book works itself out, rather more so than in the most recent story.

In the first chapter the body of a Russian poet is found on the street in Edinburgh, and everyone who appears in the story - and I mean everyone - is in some way involved with this man, from politicians to small time crooks, from drug addicts to pushers, from academics to bankers.  Not a soul is outside the ever-widening circle of people who are affected.  It's so well written it would easily have made a fitting climax to the Rebus series, and Rebus himself is in fine form - ageing  but not old; sarcastic but witty, anti-authoritarian yet endeavouring to train the younger police officers to respect the right channels.  He knows from his own career how difficult it is to go against the flow.

There's a lot of warmth in this book; more than in some of the Rebus stories.  There's minimal violence - apart from the murder(s) obviously - though the arch villain Big Ger Cafferty comes a bit of a cropper, much to Rebus' annoyance (!)  It's the sort of cropper that could see Cafferty die before he pays his dues.  Rebus would much prefer that he's put behind bars legitimately.

Perhaps, having read the two most recent Rebus titles back to front, I should continue in the same vein, and read through the series again, in reverse!

Stats of a different kind

In his book, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín has a chapter on the writer, James Baldwin. On page 314, in relation to Baldwin's concerns about the experiences of black people in America, and the ongoing racial blindness between white and black, he notes the following statistics (which are a little date, but have doubtless worsened rather than improved):


At the end of 2005, there were close 2.2 million prisoners in federal, state or local jails in the United States.  Three thousand one hundred and forty-five black men out of every 100,000 lived as sentenced prisoners, compared to 471 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males; this compares to an estimated 3,000 out of every 100,000 members of the population of Russia who were in jail during Stalin's reign. 


As of 2006, seven million people in the United States were behind bars, on probation or on parole.  The United States has 5 per cent of the world's population and 25 per cent of its prisoners.  737 per 100,000 compared to 100 n Australia and 50 in Norway and 37 in Japan and 29 in Iceland and India. England and Wales, with roughly the same crime rate as the United States, have 149 per 100,000 in prison.  


A report from the Justice Department estimated that 12 per cent of American black men in their twenties and early thirties are in jail now, compared to 1.6 per cent of white males of the same age group.  The general prison numbers in the United States have double since 1990. 


Incidentally, Tóibín's book is primarily about writers and their families, not about crime and black people.  

Dog City

The little block of houses we live in has become Dog City.

There are only three houses in our block - until a couple of weeks ago, the only dogs were our Pomeranian cross and the old poodle in the house behind us, a dog that's not in the best of health and has problems with her eyesight as well.   Occasionally she'll have a bark at us through the fence, but it's mostly because she's not quite sure who's there, I think.  (Her only other quirk is to come out late at night, usually after we're in bed, and snort her way back and forth along the fence line, hunting for burglars, no doubt, or any other beings who have decided to encroach on her territory.)

Our dog, at a year old, doing
his somewhat bewildered look. 

The people on our right side used to have an elderly dog that never made a sound and wouldn't have said boo to a goose - if any such ever appeared around here.  It had to be put down quite some time ago.  This last week, the people there have got themselves two puppies, gorgeous ones (whose model I'm not sure of). One of them is pretty quiet, but the other feller likes to maintain that it's his territory and woe betide any dog who comes near - or even any neighbour who does.

Which will sometimes set our dog off.

On the other side of us we had had a woman living on her own for at least a decade.  She was dogless.  Recently, having retired, she sold the house and is currently spending some of her children's inheritance by going to exotic places like Russia.   The people who moved in, a lovely, friendly couple, have a dog.  A little dog, like ours, one, that like ours, thinks the entire block belongs to him, and no other dog should dare to sniff the wind (or do any other sort of sniffing) within cooee of him.  (It may be a her, I'm not sure.)

Suddenly it's:
dogs to the right of me,
a dog to the left of me,
one dog behind me,
volleying and thundering,
metaphorically....

politico

I just came across a news website called Politico.com. Fascinating stuff if you're into US politics in a big way - and by 'big way' I mean a really, really big way.   Every jot and tittle is covered until your brain is soaked in the stuff.  It's like being in New Zealand during the Rugby World Cup; supposedly nothing else goes on in people's minds except the awful game (and of course, I mean 'awful' in the old sense: awe-ful - don't I?)  Talking of which, though I hadn't intended to, the USA beat Russia yesterday; bit ironic, huh?

Anyway, back to Politico.com.  It's the online version of a real newspaper which has a relatively small circulation of 32,000, according to Wikipedia.   However, that's bolstered more than a little by the 6.7 million (unique) visitors the online version gets each month.   It kind of doesn't matter that the paper version is so small, when you add those two together.  

Politico focuses on the backstories, rather than the big headlines - according to its mission statement - and they aim to make their stories just as interesting as talking with the reporter over a sandwich or a beer.   Amongst of heap of stories floating around their site, I found this line: post-Sept. 11 veterans suffer a 23 percent unemployment rate. “After a decade of war, it’s time to focus on nation-building here at home. And our veterans, especially our 9/11 generation veterans, have the skills and the dedication to help lead ... 

There's a great deal about veterans on the site; it's plainly a big issue in the US, but not one that has hit our newspapers here with any great impact.  Our involvement has been so minimal, comparatively speaking, in the so-called war on terror, that we can practically count our lost soldiers on one (maybe two) hands.  Not so in the States, where thousands of men and women have died fighting a war that, IMHO, should never have been.  But it was, and now the US is facing the consequences of that.  There are sites where you can find information on a Military VA Loan for instance (I'm assuming VA stands for something like Veterans' Association, but I could be wrong). and the need to get veterans back on their feet is obviously very high on everyone's priority list, including Obama's.   Veterans can get home loans with no down payment, for instance, and the maximum loan you can go for is a whopping (by NZ standards) $US719,000.   That's some loan, but hopefully the Vets are getting enough in payments to cover that sort of mortgage.  

From where I sit (and I'm not likely to be alone in not understanding the full ins and outs of the current American monetary crises) it's hard to appreciate everything that's going on in the US economy.  (It's always been hard, mind you, not helped by the overly involved system that's evolved over there.)   For me it becomes a big clutter - even seven seasons of West Wing didn't help greatly.  I guess the way to understand it better would be to focus on something like the Vets and their situation.  I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to focus like that, but at least, when you're faced with a major issue, breaking it down in some way helps!

Goodies and baddies

We watched Air Force One again last night; I’d forgotten how jingoistic it is.

Near the beginning Harrison Ford (playing the President of the USA) gives a speech (in Russia) saying how he won’t stand for little terrorists taking over as presidents of little countries and the US will step in and stop them! And it goes on in like fashion throughout.

We’ve already seen the US SAS-equivalent flying in and capturing one of these little terrorists while shooting everyone else in sight (of course these people don't count; they're just unnamed guards 1 through to 20, and no one cares that they might be real human beings). One never gets to sympathise in any way with the baddies: Gary Oldman is the main baddie and he has some very nasty scenes, which only make us hate him more and more.

Of course it’s very excitingly done, and is full of tension (Wolfgang Petersen at his best). Harrison Ford does his usual steely-eyed stuff at the crucial moments (see picture), and it’s a wonder the baddies don’t turn into butter and melt away. And not only is he the President he’s also a Father and a Husband. Oldman tries to get in a word edgeways about being a 'father' too (with three little kiddies), but you know he doesn’t have a capital F on his version of 'father.'

A couple of quotes from reviews about this movie:

The two hours of this movie felt like such an eternity that I was certain my clothes were going to be out of style by the time it was over. [Charles Taylor in Salon.com]

The movie also resurrects that ancient and dependable standby, the Choosing of the Wires. In countless other movies, the bomb squad hesitates between ``Red . . . or black? Red . . . or black''). This is a big-budget movie and presents us with five wires. It's an emergency, and the president needs to decide which two he should connect. See if you can guess the right two colors. The choices are green, yellow, red, white and blue. [Roger Ebert]