Michael Kevane

Diabré is a former deputy of the National Assembly in the 1990s, a Minister of Finance, he then served a time at UNDP, and also the French nuclear group Areva.  He was a fellow for a year at Harvard (where I met him for breakfast!).  So he well-acquainted with the corridors of power (me!) and a formidable challenge to the Compaoré brothers.  The elections of December 2 have led to big shakeups in the CDP, the party of President Compaoré.

RFI has a good interview with Diabré (see below for the link).  This passage worried me.

J’ai aussi des divergences sur la manière dont la société est gérée. Le Burkina Faso a une histoire qui nous a enseigné des valeurs de travail, d’intégrité, de sobriété. J’ai comme l’impression qu’il y a un laisser-aller à ce niveau-là. Et on le voit bien dans la manière dont la corruption se développe dans notre pays, que nous ne pouvons pas accepter.

Are we back to the same old moralizing “balayeur” language of many an African opposition leader and coup leader?  The whole “cleansing of society” stuff?  Get more concrete M. Diabré please!

via Zéphirin Diabré sur RFI: «Les Burkinabè souhaitent que notre pays fasse l’expérience de l’alternance» – Burkina Faso – RFI.

Perusing the catalog of a children’s publisher Kalimat in Emirates, suddenly realized that almost none of the women and girls depicted were wearing head scarves.  Says something about what professional women want their children to think is “normal”: no head scarf.

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I am reading Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, over the last few days, and I could swear one of the characters in the small town of Gopher Prairie, about which Lewis feels so ambivalent, mouths exactly Douthat’s lament… and that was in 1915!  I guess if you have to write a column/blog every single day, you get decadent and lazy and shrug off basic sacrifices like thinking of new things to say.  One thing I love about conservatives, they so reliably exclude (“our” civilization, not yours).

I basically agree with Ross Douthat here by Tyler Cowen on December 2, 2012

The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

His link is here, and I willingly admit that I am in some ways part of the problem.

I just read the story, by 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan, last night.  Pretty riveting, but also hard to understand without the full context.  You wonder about how much is working as a broad allegory (and what it might mean) of local society? Of national zeitgeist under the Communist “to get rich is glorious” Party… an opening image is of the town butcher forcing formaldehyde into a dead pig to pump it up.  I’m no literary critic, for that I rely on Betsey at Mookse, you can click through to her comments.  An excerpt:

“Bull”, by Mo Yan, is an excerpt from a novel set in a rural Chinese village where the “blood money” of commerce rules. Blood is almost a character in this story; early on, the narrator tells us that as a child he could smell the butcher coming, because “blood…doesn’t wash off.” The story revolves around bloody commerce – – the slaughterhouse, the violence of its markets, the willingness of the merchant to cheat his customer or poison him, the mysterious ways of the salesman, and the way a whole society can itself become, in the wake of commerce, a slaughterhouse. This is no tale of the ‘man in the gray flannel suit’. By chapter’s end, the hero is covered and clothed in bull’s blood.

You can also read the story here.  It is carefully constructed, even in translation and as an excerpt from a novel.  To me it worked just as well as Jeffrey Eugenides excerpt from The Marriage Plot published some time ago.  That is, it piqued me enough to want to read the novel.

Cross-posted from FAVL blog.

Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara has sacked his government in a row over a new marriage law which would make wives joint heads of the household.  Mr Ouattara’s party supported the changes but the members of the ruling coalition were opposed.  The strongest opposition came from the PDCI, which backed Mr Ouattara in the disputed November 2010 election.  Analysts say the splits highlight the continued political instability in the world’s major cocoa producer…..Like many African countries, Ivory Coast’s law currently recognises the husband as head of the household, responsible for all major decisions – a situation Mr Ouattara’s RDR wanted to change

via BBC News – Ouattara dissolves Ivorian government over marriage law.

SOMETIMES life is like a fun-house mirror, the glass and then the real thing. I had just watched the TV show “The New Normal,” a comedy about what used to be called untraditional families, for the first time, and the same day I read about Mitt Romney’s son Tagg and his wife, Jennifer, having twins through a surrogate pregnancy, using the same surrogate mother they had back in 2009. A week later, a few choice remarks were made about single mothers in the presidential debate.

I laughed about it with my neighbor, C, who gave me her usual incredulous look and said, “For reals?” She hadn’t heard.

She had just stopped pumping breast milk for the last baby she delivered, who belonged to a wealthy couple in another state. She had to drive 45 miles every day back to the hospital with an ice chest because, she said, “They bought the milk, too.”

My block doesn’t fit into the neat 47 percent category, because a lot of people don’t get any government help, though they could use it. I’ve lived here for 25 years, got divorced 15 years ago (though my ex-husband comes by nearly every day). Another neighbor has been here for 18 years, and her husband left three years ago for a younger woman — midlife crisis, we joked, though she’s alone with an autistic son and only part-time work as a funeral and wedding singer. We bring each other food, help each other with kids and rides, and we hang on.

I’ve seen neighbors come and go, and I hope C stays forever. She was married at 16 years old, and she had two daughters before her husband was murdered. She married again, had three more children, and then that husband was convicted of a crime she can barely bring herself to mention to me. He’s in prison “forever, I hope.”

Now she’s married to F, who came to California 20 years ago from El Salvador. He works at an oil refinery, she works hourly assignments as a surgical tech, and last summer he had to sell his beloved motorcycle from my front yard for $600 so they could pay the utilities bill that went so high because of August heat.

via Making Babies, Just to Make Ends Meet – NYTimes.com.