Thoughts on Crisis

I have used this break

to get caught up on some reading.

I picked up this first edition copy of Susan Sontag’s

Trip To Hanoi

from a vender on Bedford Ave some days previous.

The book was printed in 1968

by The Noonday Press.

I have been thinking a lot about a culture’s reaction

to disasters,

and how the press captures these reactions,

since the earthquake in Japan.

Sontag journals of the

Vietnamese’s reaction to the bombing during

The Vietnam War:

“We see only a handsome, evenly impoverished, clean Asian city; we see charming, dignified people living

amid bleak material scarcity and the most

rigorous demands on their energies and patience.  The leveled towns and

villages in the countryside to which we drive on short trips already constitute a tableau from the past,

a thoroughly accepted environment

in which people go on functioning, working toward their victory, making their revolution.

I wasn’t prepared for all this calm.

Thinking about Vietnam in America,

it seems natural to dwell on destruction and suffering.

But not here.

In Vietnam, there is also a peaceful, fiercely industrious present with which a visitor must be connected; and I am not.

I want their victory.

But I don’t understand their revolution.”

Sontag goes on to note:

“Breton has distinguished two forms of the will

in authentic revolutionary struggle:

“revolutionary patience” and

“the cry.”

Much of the current news coverage of the earthquake

in Japan

has recently shifted to an understanding

of the country’s response to the devastation there.

I was reading an article titled,

“Reeling From Crises, Japan Approaches Familiar Crossroad,”

in The New York Times this morning

where one reporter predicted

that the

earthquake would “signal a new era”

in Japan’s history.

Having not traveled to Japan,

I feel ill-equipped to grasp

this statement in its totality.

And yet I feel compelled to understand it

and what it signifies for the people of Japan.

My thoughts are with them.

Thoughts On Cuba

Journalists report Cuba’s current ration system provides its citizens approximately 12 days worth of food a month.  Today, the BBC announced that the Cuban government, a single party system, is devaluing its currency 8% to match the US dollar in an “effort to increase tourism;” “each convertible peso will still be worth 24 of the standard pesos in which most Cubans are paid under the communist island’s two-tier currency system.”

This effort will make “foreign imports more expensive, but the government said it hoped to compensate for this by increasing domestic production, especially food.” In fact, according to Patrick Symmes’ interesting piece of investigative journalism, “30 Days As A Cuban,” published in Harper’s in 2010, state production of food fell 13 percent in 2010.  There are fewer entries for food in Cuban’s libretas – the state issued food ration book – than during the starving “Special Period” in 1995.

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