Why are people still dying at soccer games?

Seriously, it’s 2009.

At least 22 people were killed yesterday in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast, when a wall collapsed at the Houphouet-Boigny stadium as spectators tried to enter. Apparently some ticket-holders were denied entry, leading to crowd trouble that resulted in the crushing deaths of a score of people and the wounding of over 100. Police, fearing riots after scuffles broke out in the overcrowded stadium, fired teargas into the crowd; some reports suggest that the gas exacerbated the panic. Officials are blaming the ruckus on people without tickets who bribed their way past security and into the stadium.

The search for new Jeffersons

So I’m reading Barnett’s blog today, something that I do less and less as time goes on. (I find him to be rather repetitive and self-impressed, and I have little patience with people whose analysis gets shaped around their worldview rather than vice-versa. I’m sure all “public intellectuals” are somehwat susceptible to this charge, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.) In any event, while blogging Edward Luttwak’s recent WSJ piece “Two Alliance: U.S.-Sunni versus U.S.-Shiite,” TPMB writes: “let’s be realistic about two things: 1) Tom Jefferson ain’t the next guy who’ll show up when you topple the typical dictator (that’s just too big a leap)” [the second thing wasn't that interesting]. Now this comment on its own isn’t particularly significant, except that in reading the last pages of Gourevitch’s Rwanda book last night I came across a very similar comment. Obviously the sentiment isn’t exactly new, that we can’t always expect a democrat to step in during revolutionary transitions. It boggles the mind that there are people who wouldn’t have learned this lesson by now, but they seem still to exist.

Orwell and Rwanda

Tonight I read two things: an article and the beginning of a book. The former is Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” which has disabused me of any pretensions I had to being a good writer. The latter: Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, published in 1998 after the author traveled extensively in Rwanda. I recently watched “Hotel Rwanda,” which — apart from the performance of the great Don Cheadle — I have to say was a crushing disappointment. I could go on and on about oversimplification and a movie’s inability to address a complex issue like the Rwandan genocide in any meaningful way, but I’d rather not. Suffice it to say that I don’t think the film lived up to the hype. When talking about it with one of my roommates, she mentioned that she had the Gourevitch book and I should take a look at it.

The reason that I even mention the Orwell essay is this: part of the reason for starting this blog was to write regularly and to improve. I’m not sure that either thing has happened to the extent that I would have hoped. So Gourevitch can be my muse, and hopefully Orwell will be my inspiration.