On the move again . . . 

A Web Undone 2 is moving again, but will hopefully stay put for a while in its new home at http://www.williamsonday.com.

11:21:01 PM    

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Peace Corps Online | November 25, 2002 - Buffalo News: President Kennedy's suffering forged his character "It is not a compliment to our secularized society that we are obsessed with a man's, or woman's, weaknesses to the exclusion of their gifts and their accomplishments. Kennedy helped begin, but could not finish, the civil rights revolution. He might have stopped the Vietnam War. He slashed income taxes, incubated Medicare and the Peace Corps, prosecuted the Mafia, defied the Soviet Union at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and endowed America's victory in the space race. And he took a lot of pills. Suffering can deepen a man, and stimulate his better nature, make him empathetic. Kennedy's ceaseless pain, and his brushes with death in the Pacific and on the operating table, did not dull his wit, or make him shrink from life or from people. It made him more courageous and cerebral."

10:03:35 PM    

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 Revised Pledge for AmeriCorps Draws Critics [New York Times: Politics]  The Republican Congress's addition of an optional "So help me God" to the Americorps oath should not come as a surprise.  It is sad, however, that the same Congress has ignored the substantive needs of the government's volunteer programs by killing the "Peace Corps Charter for the 21st Century" (S. 2667) while it obsesses over purely symbolic -- and divisive -- measures designed to flaunt the Members' religiosity.  What would Jesus say?

11:26:52 AM    

 Geoffrey Wheatcroft reviews Thomas Friedman's Longitudes and Attitudes in the New York Times:

"'Longitudes and Attitudes'' is a collection of columns, from December 2000 to this past July, broken by September's great caesura, and including material from his diary, notes made but not used as he traveled to the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia, London, Brussels. . . .

"For years, Friedman's big idea has been free enterprise in its new form of globalization: ''the inexorable integration of markets, transportation systems and communication systems to a degree never witnessed before,'' which he believed would solve most of the world's ills. Not that ''the maximum of intercourse between nations'' was a new notion, or a bad one. Long before we had heard of the Web, Richard Cobden put it splendidly in 1850 when he said that ''the progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.'"

Both Friedman's idea that commerce cures all ills and his prediction of coming disaster in the Middle East are profoundly disconcerting. Naturally, I am adding this book to my list of books to read.

8:59:57 PM    

 

Jazz without borders. Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem creates an international sound. ["SFGate"] [Dan Mitchell: Music Notes]

Go to the review to listen to sample of the compser's haunting melodies.  I hope he visits Washington on his next tour.

10:37:18 PM    

 

To Africa With Family, to Meet Friends [New York Times: Travel] 

This story evokes the difficulty of recapturing the past and sustaining connections to people we knew in other parts of our lives.  At the same time, it suggests how how rewarding the attempt to recapture those connections can be, particularly if one is not simply trying to relive the past, but views the attempt as a new experience in its own right.  In the end, what was important was not the fact that the author could speak Wolof only in broken sentences and could recall only some names in the Senegelese village where he had lived, but that he tried.

11:20:36 AM