Posts Tagged ‘journalism’

I’m delighted to report that Vanguard over at former VPOTUS Al Gore’s Current.com is finally back on track following a long and completely understandable production hiatus. Things got off to an uncharacteristically shaky start this year, what with Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s monumental repatriation Stateside from Bam Bam’s “Paradise On Earth,” and whipping the Vanguard A-team back into fighting shape for 2010 turned out initially to be something of a challenge. Thankfully, things are happily im ordnung.

I caught up last night with a deuce of stellar Mariana Van Zeller shows: “Missionaries of Hate” and “Soccer’s Lost Boys.”

#KABOOM!

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(the Former US President & his Veep, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, respectively. Laura Ling and Euna Lee embrace their families and their saving graces)

I was disturbed by some recent highly-critical remarks (pictured below) appearing the other day on my Facebook Wall concerning the Laura Ling/Euna Lee “captive in North Korea” saga.

So much so, actually, that I thought it was time to compile my thoughts and feelings into a small introductory post along with a promised follow-up, as you’ll shortly read, once I have a chance to do more homework on the issue.

Here’s what’s been eating me over the past forty-eight hours…

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So are North Korea bloggers better than English language China bloggers?

Well after a concerted year of following both the busy Korean and Chinese blogospheres, I’m prepared to go out on a limb to say the edge goes decidedly to the Koreans.

I say this because the Korean blogosphere often functions in a relative vacuum of information, compared to China, forced to cobble together its witty opinions and incisive viewpoints within the patchwork of many isolated and unrelated bits and pieces of data which bear little or no resemblance to the other. Trying to get an angle on the DPRK scene is a skill, not an art, friends. A deft combination of years of experience, a keen intuition, and with the help of some very capable (South Korean) fixers and contacts on the ground north of the 38th, which is nearly impossible to find, save for intrepid souls like Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. So what’s the Great Leader thinking now, you ask? Hard to say, I reply, unless you’re game to regurgitate the usual DPRK agit-prop bluster and noise which emits daily from North Korea’s propaganda department and have the temerity to reproduce it as news.

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Thank heavens for small miracles, folks. Small miracles like globalization.

Why?

Well thanks to this most ornery of mega-planetary economic phenomena, one can always remain confident of somehow finding themselves at an English language bookshop in pretty much any large European city, regardless of the national language. And let’s face it, the very best fictional and non-fictional works today are churned out in the English language, folks, and there’s no debate there. Globalization means more English books available for the road-weary in all of us. Stranded hopelessly because of some geological narishkeit taking place on that lone frigid island somewhere off in the Atlantic. Anyways…

It’s with that in mind that I was happy to stumble across Jan Wong’s most excellent Chinese Whispers: A Journey Into Betrayal (336pp, paperback, British edition, US edition here, affiliate link) in one of my favorite Bern bookshops, Thalia.ch. Thalia’s housed in the “soussol” of Bern’s Loeb department store, located directly in front of the Swiss capital’s main train station, or hauptbahnhof, in case you’ll be passing through the city anytime soon. Note on language: don’t you just love how Swiss German, as a tongue, borrows liberally from the French? – hochdeutsch this throaty German is not, all you linguistic purists out there. Understandable, I guess, given how the country is trilingual (or nominally quadrilingual) and borders, ew, France. Still, I always chuckle whenever I overhear a Berner or Zuricher give directions to some wayward German or Austrian tourist while using the word strasse, or street. Instead of saying the word properly, as a Hamburger or a Berliner might, they drag out their variation’s a, roll its r, and do their level best to sound like Bill or Ted in some cheesy ‘80s flick. The word ends up sounding like straaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasse, which to indeed is an acquired taste; though my love of the Swiss, especially in the German-speaking cantons, remains as strong as ever. The worst part about Swiss German is how they cause all these hot Latin immigrants to gobble up the Swiss German accent hook, line, and sinker. They give them a disease they don’t want to have. It’s like rape. It’s like what mange cake (literally “cake-eating,” but what are otherwise white people) Torontonians do to their immigrants: they make bland white bread out of exotic Latinos and South Americans and it’s a damn cryin’ shame. Though I digress (but I’m entitled to since I’ve just returned from a marathon thirty hour combined train and bus journey).

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I’ve been religiously following Current.com’s new season of Vanguard dispatches, and this latest one from Mariana van Zeller from Sri Lanka about how the Sinhalese majority crushed the two-and-a-half decade long Tamil insurgency was brilliant.