Salon.com > David Rubien

Aung San Suu Kyi

Tue, 27 Feb 2001 20:06:00 +0000

A question that has to haunt anyone pondering the predicament of Burma's democratic resistance leader Aung San Suu Kyi is: Why hasn't she been killed? She is, after all, a major thorn in the sides of the military dictators who have been driving the Southeast Asian nation to ruin for the past 38 years. Certainly she would not be the first popular opposition leader to be murdered by despots.

The simple answer is they missed their chance. Suu Kyi (pronounced soo chee), 55, was first confined to house arrest in 1989, months before her National League of Democracy won Burma's last election in a landslide. The dictators ignored the election results and proceeded to arrest all the NLD leaders they hadn't already jailed previously, and continued the kind of repression that had been the junta's modus operandi since 1962. But in 1991 something happened that the dictators couldn't have anticipated. Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize. The eyes of the world suddenly became focused on this slight, Buddhist woman locked in her home, forbidden from picking up her award. But her captors came under international gaze as well, and killing Suu Kyi now would be too reckless a move even for a junta that makes murder and slavery cornerstones of its policy.

Molly Ivins

Tue, 12 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000

Leave it to Molly Ivins to cut through the crap. Commentators in the Florida election morass have almost without exception lined up in strict formation based on their party affiliations, conservatives calling for a Bush anointment, liberals saying Gore was robbed. And the dialogue is getting ruder and ruder.

So which side does Ivins -- probably more proudly partisan than any other pundit in the business -- line up on in the biggest ballot-counting brouhaha in modern history? Well, of course she doesn't cotton to the idea of George W. Bush as president. Let's get that out of the way right from the start. Ivins, who writes a widely syndicated column for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is a native Texan who, as a lefty, has a unique perspective on W. and all the Bushes. She recently authored the bestselling "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" (a title she may come to regret, temporally speaking), and she commented extensively on the unique follies of W.'s dad, George Herbert Walker Bush, during the president's glorious post-Reagan reign.

Keith Jarrett

Mon, 04 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000

Jazz artists who came of age in the '50s, '60s or early '70s tend to place a premium on originality. These were years of rapid evolution, and players wanted to do their part to advance the music. So when, in their waning years, musicians from this era resort to playing tunes out of the standard repertory, it's generally a sign of spiritual exhaustion -- like when a movie actor lands a sitcom.

It's interesting, then, that pianist Keith Jarrett -- one of the more unusual talents in the past 35 years of the music -- now finds himself in his most creative phase playing almost nothing but classics. Since forming in 1983, his trio with drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Gary Peacock has staked a claim as the preeminent jazz group interpreting standards; it's probably the closest a piano trio has come to the Olympian heights of the late Bill Evans' trios. At the piano, Jarrett, 55, has an improvisational zeal matched by a technique that is equal parts meditation and explosion. He is one of the few living jazz pianists with an instantly recognizable sound.

Rev. Billy Graham

Tue, 21 Nov 2000 18:23:00 +0000

The Rev. Billy Graham, for 50 years Protestant Christianity's leading Pied Piper, is ailing. He turned 82 on Nov. 7, and has been grappling with Parkinson's disease and other infirmities. Yet he recently told the Associated Press that his crusading days are far from through. As his son William Franklin Graham Jr. stands by to assume control of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the elder Graham just presided over one of his patented crusades, a Jacksonville, Fla., wingding that featured performances by Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash and Charlie Daniels. As usual, Graham convinced thousands of attendees to make their "decisions for Christ."

He's been doing this since 1947. Depending on the source you consult, he's corralled between 200 million and 225 million souls for Jesus. He's sermonized in almost 200 countries, following the biblical dictum to "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation" (Mark 16:15). The only religious figure of comparable influence is the pope, and there have been five of them since Graham started doing his thing. Popes come and go, but the right reverend endures.

Seymour Hersh

Tue, 18 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh must feel like he's howling into the darkness sometimes. His eighth and latest book, "Against All Enemies," which gruesomely details the extent of Gulf War Syndrome and the government's attempts to pretend it doesn't exist, has been selling indifferently and has been ignored by a surprising number of reviewers. His 1972 "Cover-Up," a report on the Army's cowardly investigation of the My Lai massacre -- the bloodbath Hersh had previously exposed in his blockbuster "My Lai 4" -- also sold poorly. When he revealed in 1991's "The Samson Option" that Israel was secretly stockpiling nuclear weapons, the response was yawns. What's the hardest-working muckraker in the journalism business to do?

Garry Trudeau

Tue, 02 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Much has been made of Ronald Reagan biographer Edmund Morris' invention of himself as a fictional character in order to plumb the cryptic psyche of our cherished former president, but consider this: In 1987, Garry Trudeau, creator of "Doonesbury," beat Morris to the punch, only inversely. Battered by the realization that after eight bizarro years Reagan was basically beyond satire, Trudeau couldn't let go of him. So in one of "Doonesbury's" more perverse tropes, he created a Reagan alter ego called Ron Headrest, who existed in electronic form only and mischievously popped up at will on people's TV screens.

Based on the computer-generated, stuttering '80s TV character "Max Headroom," Headrest was a shtick-figure Reagan with an unleashed id who could smear the 1988 presidential candidates at will ("So is P-P-Paul Laxalt mobbed up?") and finally declared himself one. "If elected president I promise to lie, lie!" cracked a leering Headrest from the tube. "I'll s-s-set up illegal covert operations and lie about them to Congress and the American p-p-people! If detected I promise to falsify documents, shred evidence and preserve plausible de-de-deniability! Then I'll take the Fifth! But with moist eyes! And selflessly ...!"

The Artist you better not call Prince

Mon, 27 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

So here it is, 1999, and what's the dude who used to go by his real name, Prince, up to?

Well, for one thing, he's keeping up his hissy fit against Warner Bros., the label he broke free from three years ago after 17 years of spinning out the hits. Because Warner Bros. owns the tune "1999" -- as it does all of the former Prince music recorded under contract -- the purple wonder has gone and rerecorded a whole bunch of new versions of the song, from hip-hop "1999" to Latino "1999," and made them available through his retail arm. Warner Bros. still may have its own plans for the song; in the meantime it has just released a disc of previously unreleased Prince material called "The Vault -- Old Friends 4 Sale," which the ex-Prince has dissed on his Web site thus: "An anonymous in4mer who just recently heard a testing pressing 4 the upcoming "PRINCE" release (aptly titled) 'Old Friends 4 Sale' said this recording sounds like a CONtractual obligation ... nothing more or less."

Ah, the hissy fit. It seems the Prince who dare not speak his name can't let go of what he has already let go of.