My 2007 Retrospective Post: These People Are Still Fucked

Because when people lose hope that their suffering will ever end, they start dying:

"There is a psychological effect here," said one aid official in Sudan who did not want to be identified because he feared reprisals from the Sudanese government. "These people have been in these camps for years now, and the energy that was around a few years ago and the hopes that this situation might be over soon and people could go home -- all that's gone now."

The Sudanese government seems to know that time is on its side. Another year is about gone, and the ethnic cleansing in Darfur is that much further along.

Apologies for the curse in the headline, but between this and the news in Pakistan, it's just a freaking hell of an upbeat day worldwide.

I Want to Sex Mutombo

When Tracy McGrady was asked ended up sleeping with Darfurian refugees from a genocide, he can't give a straight answer. ("I still don't know why, but I knew I had to go.") But here's a hint:

McGrady's journey began months ago when he made a donation to the construction of Dikembe Mutombo's hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Mutombo, McGrady's Rockets teammate since 2004, in July opened the 300-bed, $29 million Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, named for his late mother.

Mutombo told him about Africa's humanitarian tragedies, including Darfur.

Noble "Why yes I do give a flying dip"-type actions tend to beget noble actions. While inaction tends to beget distractions, sometimes disastrous ones.

You Can Hear Them Clang When Abby Wambach Walks By

She's the leader of the U.S. team, the one cameras and the tape recorders are all crowded around. And yet, right before the team goes abroad, at a time when they'll desperately need their focus, she's got the stones to go and raise a scatstorm like this:

She likes to talk about more substantive topics, like famine, HIV and genocide in Africa. Even her T-shirt collection has taken on a more serious tone. In the team handbook the U.S. put out before its trip to China, Wambach is pictured with one that says SAVE DARFUR.

Wait, there was neither shit, nor fan? She's actually still playing? And still in Nike commercials? And Nike still sells Wambach gear? She has not, to date, been scrubbed from the dread company's records? She hasn't been stuffed into a bag and buried under the Great Wall?

Wow. Athlete speaks out, the turning of the world continues. I bet you could knock a Cleveland Cavalier over with a feather right about now.

One Year Until Ixnay on the Arfur Day!

The NYT's George Vecsey is just crazy about Chinese ... Olympic architecture:

Yet there is a tremendous upside to these Games: the exposure to modern China, including the Olympic architecture. Exactly one year from today, there will be four swimming finals in Beijing’s National Aquatics Center, nearly finished and already nicknamed the Water Cube because it looks like a square of sparkling water, instantly frozen, bubbles and all.

Next door is the main Olympic stadium, glowing a bright red and nicknamed the Bird’s Nest because of the steel twig-like prongs woven together. “To promote traditional feng shui balance between fire and water, the venues were placed side by side,” wrote John Powers of The Boston Globe, who recently visited Beijing.

China is near.

That chill up your spine came from someone inexplicable trying to write like Tom Friedman. Or the screenwriter of Highlander.

Vecsey goes on to absolutely wonder at the fact that China seems to have ... yuppies!* Why this is noteworthy, I still can't figure out.

Nor can I figure why, with all the issues surrounding the rise of China, Vecsey decides to deconstruct Olympic architecture like it's the Slusho viral marketing campaign. But in addition to the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube he could have mentioned:

1. The genocide that gets bankrolled by China's do-what-ya-like capitalism.
2. If that's too out there, man, here's a slam dunk: All those Mattel toys that were covered with lead. And the Chinese head of the company who committed suicide after the news about the lead hit. Maybe Vecsey should focus on the feng shui between prominent embarrassments to the country and the corpses that seem to follow. What's going to happen to the Chinese environmental bigwigs when the summer of 2008 rolls around and the air in Beijing still sucks? (Hint: Odds seem decent that they'll die.)
   

*Note to Vecsey: Every country has yuppie elites. Long before I saw any American idiots wearing those Bluetooth hands-free earbuds, I saw Ghanaian idiots** wearing them. They were sitting on the patio next to Busy Internet, overlooking the open sewer and the highway where some poor sap was pulling a cart clearly built for a beast of burden. The open sewer was a better indicator than the earbuds.

**Yeah, Ghana's better off than many. But point stands: Every country has a First Class section.

Of Sports Heroes and Filthy Lucre

Just before the weekend, Darren Rovell ran an interview with a Nike bigwig who talked about what China means to his company:

Denson: The Olympics are a great point in time and the Beijing Olympics are going to transcend the world of sport. They will become a monumental event throughout the world.

DR: I can't believe how big 2004 gold medal hurdler Liu Xiang is in this country...

Denson: When I think of Liu Xiang, I think of Michael Jordan in the mid 80s, I think of what Tiger Woods and Lebron James mean to Nike in the United States or what Ronaldinho in Europe and in the world of football (soccer).

The bolding of Denson's pandering to Chinese nationalism and his invocation of He Who Came First are mine. Because I didn't want you to have to read a lot of baloney about some foreign country, and because I want to stress that Nike is probably going to chastise the Chinese government when Darfur freezes over.

So, let's put this issue to bed: Yes, LeBron's signature on Ira Newble's open letter to China would indeed have been a "slam dunk." As, in a cheap easy way to score points without any repercussions. Neither "China" (businessmen, politicians, fans) nor Nike were going to slap LBJ down for it.

But then, as Charles P. Pierce noted, athletes don't really speak out about these things anymore. The strike Jesus Christ poses, but they sure don't open their mouths and say anything interesting. "Wacky" is pretty much the best you can hope for from them anymore.

In the same article: The brilliant CEO of Li-Ning, China's biggest domestic shoe company, thinks he has an advantage because "we know how to make shoes that are comfortable for the Chinese population." If he really thinks selling shoes is about comfort, then I can't help but think the Swoosh will swallow the rest of China's shoebuying demographic by about 2015.

It Ain't Puppies, But Maybe Now More People Will Care

Tell anyone you know: the Darfur genocide threatens the hidden island of elephants. It may temporarily stop them from offering you the international signal for "quit wanking off" when you mention the awfulness.

Brainpower: African Genocide Has Nothing on Vick's Dogfighting

FanHouse's Dan Benton says the latest revelations linking Michael Vick to dogfighting may sink his career with the Falcons.

And how. Because, as Nicholas Kristof ($) notes in today's Times: You can monetarily support all the apocalyptic horror in the world you want to, but you never, under any circumstances, eff with ASPCA:

...Good, conscientious people... aren’t moved by genocide or famines. Time and again, we’ve seen that the human conscience just isn’t pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.
...
Even the right animal evokes a similar sympathy. A dog stranded on a ship aroused so much pity that $48,000 in private money was spent trying to rescue it — and that was before the Coast Guard stepped in. And after I began visiting Darfur in 2004, I was flummoxed by the public’s passion to save a red-tailed hawk, Pale Male, that had been evicted from his nest on Fifth Avenue in New York City. A single homeless hawk aroused more indignation than two million homeless Sudanese.

Now, the article points out that the key here is to wrap your narrative around a single person/dog. Few people favored taking action to help the thousands of Rwandan kids getting tossed into wells and outhouses over a decade ago. But everyone cared about Baby Jessica in Midland, Texas. (And don't tell me Texas is any less foreign to your average American than Rwanda.)

Today, Vick looks to have only one thing left going for him: He is charged with keeping almost 70 dogs, and that's a heck of a lot better, PR wise, than maltreating just one dog. But at some point, pictures may come out, after which the media would settle on a dominant picture of one of these canines. Let's call him Chuck.

If people in Atlanta (which I hear has a 24-hour news network with a lot of time to fill) see how a dog named Chuck had to fight for his life and no one even cared enough to scratch his belly afterwards, Vick is stewed.

(Note: I am not being superior here. I hated those people trying to evict Pale Male from their own private property.)

Great Google-y

Moogly.