(Disturbing material warning)

John Lee Anderson’s piece “The Witness,” on Mazen al-Hamada is just wrenching.

During Assad’s rule, official autopsies of prisoners routinely said that “the patient died when his heart stopped,” eliding the specifics of torture. Hamada knew about these torments intimately, and during the war he travelled to Europe and the United States and gave searing testimony about Assad’s dungeons.…As Hamada spoke, he sometimes wept openly; videos of the testimony are excruciating to watch. He noted that he had witnessed others die from similar treatment, and vowed to see his torturers brought to justice, if it was the last thing he did before he died.

Mazen had been violently tortured in prison for a year and half before being released in 2013. His crimes included supporting union workers who worked for Schlumberger, protesting the torture of 15 teenage boys who were arrested for painting graffiti in Dara’a, attempting to smuggle baby formula into a “rebellious” suburb of Damascus, and of course he was also guilty of that most absurd act: simply telling the truth.

He escaped, like so many others, through Turkey and Greece, eventually gaining asylum in the Netherlands. He spent the last 5 years of his life again being tortured in prison after he chose to return to Syria in 2020. He was murdered about 10 days before the rebels took Damascus last December.

There are many, many, many like him.

I cannot think of Syria and not think of some of the images in Channel 4 News’s short 2016 video on the fifth anniversary of the war there — images which barely scratch the surface of the horror. I watch, while so many suffer.

“I am convinced,” said Jürgen Moltmann, “that God is with those who suffer violence and injustice and he is on their side.”

Often, the best I can muster is a silent hope that this is true, and that one day, as George Hunsinger put it, “It will be revealed to them at last that in the midst of their earthly aspirations, struggles, and persecutions, they were not alone.”

Drawing down the wealth of the world and calling it “income”:

this is a massive tragedy of the commons issue.… The seas are a classic example. Most large fish are now gone from the ocean due to what has effectively been a free for all, despite there often being such things as treaties and quotas. Fishermen typically consider themselves good stewards of the resource, but assume their competitors are plunderers — and foreign competitors are the worst. They feel compelled to increase their takes until overcapitalized fleets are competing for the last fish, and when the fishery is no longer viable, they blame it on the foreign fleets.

But every fleet is someone’s foreign fleet. That is the tragedy. And I think this fishing example can be extrapolated to our broader ecological global economic superorganism situation. “Every fleet is someone else’s fleet” is the same dynamic that we face with more and more financial claims on an underlying biophysical reality.

Thoughts that fell from the bookshelf — Miroslav Volf and the politics of the pure heart

Holy moly. I’m essentially a non-kindle reader. Very, very rarely have I read a Kindle book — never have I enjoyed it. And yet, I just downloaded my (gulp)… 230 Kindle books.

I don’t think David Bentley Hart and First Things are on speaking terms. I went to add a hyperlink to a post from a few years ago and found a dead link — not by natural causes. So, it needed an addendum.

Blessèd are those to live in interesting times.

Speaking of Nadezhda — and in the “yay for the memory of commonplace blogs” category — I’m reminded: She had them pegged in her day as well.

Those with open ears and whatnot…

Billy Collins has a wonderful thing for introductions to poetry. Of course, there’s his famous one, called “Introduction to Poetry.” In fact, when my wife and I first met, before we were dating, I got her to read it out loud to a breakroom full of coworkers. Over the years, I’ve sent that poem to any of a hundred people who “don’t like poetry,” who prefer the “Tell me what you mean and make it quick” approach to language. (I can also sic Nadezhda Mandelstam on them if it’s required.)

Anyway, I’m never sure about the copyright rules when posting whole poems online from a book I have in hand, and usually only do so when I can find them somewhere else on the internet. I’m also not sure if Google Books counts. So if this link works, Billy Collins has a new one that made me smile, called “BC/AD.”

Here’s the second half of it:

I drew a long horizontal line on the board
to represent all of human time,
then a vertical line intersecting it at the birth of Christ,
and I added a stick figure of Plato standing
on the line and a small zero off to the side.

“You see,” I announced, “Plato was born
428 years before the birth of Christ."

“But how did they know that?” she asked.

“Excellent question,” I replied, shaking my head.

Then from the back, another excellent one:
“And why do the languages change from English to Latin,
from ‘before Christ’ to ‘Anno Domini.
You would think it would be the other way around."

“You would think,” I repeated,
moving over to the big school window,
one finger pressed pensively to my lips,
to observe the orange and yellow trees,
patches of blue beyond them,
and a few ordinary birds darting through the scene,

until the bell, signaling the end of our class
and the beginning of something else, rang.

This was, after all, an introduction to poetry.

I’ve had a glitch on apple maps for at least 24 hours now. If I open the app and type “Gorham, NH” and click on it, it gives me a pin in the “Gulf of America.” It’s worked on everyone’s phone I had try it, too. Also works for Gorham, ME.