The Wire, the HBO show about the Baltimore heroin trade, was one of the best pieces of film-making I’ve ever seen.
At the link above, they ask, which character would you like to be?
I’d choose the captain who chose to legalize drugs in a chunk of ghetto Baltimore. Great character, inventive idea, fantastic actor, whose name I don’t know.
Either him, or Omar…..quite a dude.
Filed under Culture, Drugs, Storytelling
Here’s another commentary about what Republicans need to do to earn any kind of decent percentage of the Latino vote in November. (I’ve read several of these now.)
Polls I’ve heard have Romney getting 28 percent of Latino vote. This story says 26 percent, less than John McCain polled in 2008. Romney met with a Latino coalition the day after his wife spoke, according to La Opinion, hoping to cultivate some better feelings.
Yet all this will be hard to accomplish. The R leaders may want to de-emphasize the strident rhetoric, but Rs on the ground don’t seem willing to go along.
To wit: A Puerto Rican delegate to the RNC was shouted down with chants of “U-S-A” when she began to speak in her accented English. (See video above)
PBS’s Ray Suarez provides some context to the event, which explain it as something other than what the video makes it appear, though this may not make it more palatable to Latinos.
And of course, the peanut incident — where delegates threw peanuts at a black CNN camerawoman saying, “this is how we feed animals” isn’t probably going to help much, either.
Filed under Migrants
New story up this week on Tell Your True Tale is by former tagger, now community college student, Hugo Garcia.
Check out “The Raid.”
Meanwhile, I’m always happy to look at new submission of true stories. So send ‘em in…..
Filed under Tell Your True Tale
Time Magazine has a great post about illegal migration from Africa — northern and southern — into Europe.
Libya under Gaddahfi apparently controlled smuggling squads, using migrants, usually from sub-Saharan Africa, as a way of prying what he wanted out of Italy.
Now that’s changed, as has the pull of jobs in Europe, which is suffering from its own economic crisis.
Also on the same post is a link to photographs by Mexico City photographer Keith Dannemiller of Mexico’s patron saint of lost causes. His photos (one of which is above) are always worth checking out.
It appears the website, Roads and Kingdoms is well worth favoriting. Great idea for a site! I’ll be following….
Filed under Global Economy, Migrants
A couple of links related only insofar as they deal with our perceptions.
The first — the view of Earth from Mars, courtesy of Curiosity.
The second — a column about how Americans of different classes view economic growth over the last half century.
Filed under Storytelling
Gregory Powell, the last of the two `Onion Field’ killers, has died, to the regret of no one, apparently.
Powell and his accomplice, Jimmy Smith, killed LAPD Officer Ian Campbell in a Central Valley onion field. Campbell’s partner, Karl Hettinger, never truly recovered from the event.
Joseph Wambaugh was then an officer in LAPD and took a leave to write one of the all-time great true crime books about the case. The book was memorable for many things, but mostly, I thought, for its portrayal of Hettinger, who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1994. The book launched Wambaugh’s career as a true-crime writer.
The movie about the case, with James Woods as Powell, was also powerful stuff.
I wrote an obit of Jimmy Smith when he died in 2007, for which I interviewed Wambaugh.
Filed under Los Angeles, Prison, Storytelling
It was only a matter of time. The mayor of an Indian town in Guatemala has declared Internet access to be a human right.
Many Indian communities suffer because they are so isolated from the world.
Anthropologists and tourists often like their Indians very traditional. But tradition has had a way of impoverishing Indian communities.
I’ve been to Indian towns where most people don’t know how to type, use a fax, or drive. Those are formulas for poverty in the global economy. I once met a guy who was learning to type who said he was the first in his village to learn that skill.
To breaking from those impoverishing traditions is one reason why so many Indians are converting to Protestantism in Latin America.
It’s an ironic thing, but the only way to maintain a strong Indian culture is not to embrace isolation, but, as this mayor has, embrace the world. That way a village can develop economically so that its people don’t have to migrate defenseless into a world where education is the currency of value.
There was a time in the 1990s when it was fashionable on the left in Latin America to talk about the pernicious effect of globalization on the poor. But really what Indian communities need above all is more globalization, which is to say, more connectivity — that is, more roads, more Internet connections, more people who know how to type, more people who speak Spanish or English, etc.
One village in Chiapas I went to (pictured here) was part of a coffee cooperative. The only thing they wanted, coop members told me, was a connection to the Internet, which would connect them, in turn, with coffee buyers in Mexico City, or Seattle, and they wouldn’t have sell their beans to the local intermediaries who gave them rock-bottom prices.
Filed under Global Economy, Migrants
