Sunday, June 03, 2007

These Came in Sprinkles Over the Transom

Simon Romero has a stunning story in today’s Times about a Colombian FARC captive named Clara Rojas who apparently has a 3-year-old child with her in the jungle. The boy’s name is Emmanuel. Rojas was a vice-presidential aspirant when she was kidnapped in 2002. This is from the story:

“Emmanuel’s existence was first reported to an unsettled public last year. But revelations in recent weeks, including his name, obtained from an emaciated police officer who spent 17 days in the wilderness after escaping from a guerrilla encampment in southern Colombia, have shaken a country hardened by a seemingly interminable war in which kidnapping has been polished into an effective weapon.

“ ‘Clara suffered so much,’ said Jhon Frank Pinchao, the policeman who fled from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country’s largest rebel group, after eight years in captivity, in an emotional news conference here in mid-May. ‘I could hear her asking to see her son.’

“Mr. Pinchao, who said he once held Emmanuel in his arms, offered a few other details about the boy. He said the boy was healthy and was raised as ‘an Indian boy is treated.’ Two men kidnapped by the FARC, with the surnames Buitrago and Moreno, stitched clothes for Emmanuel by hand, as did the guerrillas, Mr. Pinchao said.”

I do not know if I can imagine what that means: “as ‘an Indian boy is treated.’ ” Romero goes on to quote a novelist. Here is that quote:

“ ‘If Emmanuel dies,’ Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia’s most prominent novelists, wrote in an essay, the country is in deep trouble. ‘If Emmanuel doesn’t start school and doesn’t grow healthy and strong, we will be the most savage country on earth, the dirtiest, the worst.’ ”

~

I want to write about the traveling TB patient, because it has kept me riveted in its twisty morality-play way, but this damn newspaper is on deadline tonight. But read John Schwartz’s bang-up account in the NYT. I also want to tell you about the tiny plastic penises on the plates at the table next to mine last night in a restaurant. (We were there for a bachelorette party; apparently the women next to us were there for a different, lame-ass bachelorette party where it was clearly specified on the invitation that white jeans must be worn with heels and blown-out hair. Miami freaks.) I also want to tell you about seeing one of my first great loves after 10 years yesterday, and about his beautiful little girl who sang “Happy Birthday” on his voice mail. (“Daddy!” she squealed. My hand flew to my mouth as my eyes popped with thrill and awe.) And I would tell you about a phone call I received on a cross-town bus that made me happy. But fukkit. I have to work. So I leave you with this parting gift: An assessment of Rudy Giuliani from Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone:

“Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a ‘stuck pig,’ and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn’t even bother to conceal the fact that he’s had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers.”

!

1 Comments:

At 9:40 AM, Blogger Squarehead said...

I think that Rolling Stone guy should say how he really feels....I think that situation in Colombia is the worst.....I'm sure that the traveling TB guy needs an ass kicking, but not as much as those FARC guys....I once was a fan of Rudy, kinda showing his spots these days.....Sometimes the world is a sucky place.

 

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