Salon.com > Frank Browning

Obama faces Armageddon

Sat, 26 May 2012 19:00:00 +0000

September 2008: The collapse of Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers provokes a worldwide economic meltdown.

May 2012: Barack Obama is warned before the Camp David G-8 summit that the financial maelstrom seizing Europe could turn out even worse. If much of Europe slides back into double-dip recession, as Britain has done, millions of Americans will be smacked hard, from Toyota workers in Kentucky to lettuce pickers in sunny California. And almost certainly, Mr. Obama will have turned over the keys to the White House come next January to the “vulture capitalist” Mitt Romney.

Here is the dreadful scenario that growing numbers of analysts fear: Long lines of Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese pound on bank doors demanding to pull their money out before it is replaced by devalued drachmas, pesetas, escudos. Long-suffering Greek voters fail on June 17 to elect political parties that can form a governing coalition, and Greece takes a messy exit from the Euro. Europe’s already faltering financial system then collapses, sending the entire world into a long-lasting global depression for the new President Romney to tackle.

Europe’s dirty secrets

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:14:00 +0000

Angela Merkel, Europe’s master schoolmarm, scolds her neighbors that they have “no alternative to austerity.” François Hollande, the new French president, preaches the need for growth, challenging Merkel’s leadership with a social democratic alternative. The two meet in Berlin tomorrow, for the first time since Hollande ousted Merkel’s pal, Nicolas Sarkozy. And the tension will be on display later this week, as they head to the United States for the G-8 and NATO Summit. No matter how diplomatically conducted, their conflict will determine the direction of Hollande’s presidency and the very future of Europe.

The debate can be confusing, especially for Americans. Even as Merkel insists on cost cutting, her economic team rushes to explain that Germany has always been pro-growth. Well, maybe, but Merkel’s “growth” more likely means wasting Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and France. Hollande, a one-time professor of political economy, understands this as he preps for the grip of Madame Merkel’s open arms. He knows that she will try to smother him with her much-loved Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, which would press thorny sanctions on any country that fails to hold its deficits below 3 percent of gross domestic product. This fiscal compact, drawn up by Merkel and Hollande’s defeated predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, mandates harsh spending cuts that would further deflate the continent’s already weak economies, boost unemployment, agitate unrest, reduce GDP and thereby increase everyone’s debts and deficits — including very likely her own.

Europe’s far right marches on

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Marine Le Pen, who put a friendly smile on her father’s neo-fascist National Front, has become “the third man” in French politics and could now determine whether the center-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy or the center-left Socialist François Hollande becomes the country’s next president. Geert Wilders, the golden-haired leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, has just brought down the right-wing coalition government that he had supported. And in an Oslo courtroom, Anders Behring Breivik fights to prove he was sane last July when he systematically slaughtered 77 innocent people, mostly teenagers, at a summer camp. He was, he explains, simply trying to spark a crusade against multiculturalism, “cultural Marxism” and Muslims living in Europe.

Le Pen, the "right-wing liberal" Wilders and the unbelievably weird Breivik differ in crucial ways, but they reflect the range and varied thrust of Europe’s far right, which is showing its greatest strength since World War II. All three have given up yesterday’s Jew-baiting, at least in public, and proudly proclaim their support of Israel. They all target Muslims as a major source of Europe’s current woes, preaching a white European nationalism that is largely Christian and intolerant of immigrants and other outsiders. And they all feed on a popular backlash against the European Union and Eurozone and the failure of mainstream leaders to provide any sense of hope at a time of crippling economic crisis.

Sayonara, Sarko!

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy picked Place de la Concorde to stage his big Paris rally earlier this month, he was cloaking himself in the past conservative glories of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac. Even more, he was reliving his own victory parade in 2007, when “Sarko the American” promised to completely reform the French economy. But, as state-owned France 24 reminded its English-speaking viewers, the historic site was also where the original French revolutionaries brought King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793. Ah, yes, let them eat cake.

Gunter Grass was right

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000

With his controversial poem on Israel and Iran, Günter Grass has irritated, provoked and outraged people everywhere. As Germany’s greatest living writer and a Nobel laureate in literature, he has also raised a question both inconvenient and impolite. How can decent people support a preemptive war against Iran for moving ever closer to a limited nuclear capability and, at the same time, turn a blind eye to Israel’s extensive arsenal of existing atomic bombs?

Especially in a country with so much Jewish blood on its hands, this is – or was – a question that no Good German should ask in public. It was even more verboten when asked by someone who had belatedly admitted that as a teenager he had served, however briefly, in the Nazi paramilitary unit, the Waffen SS. But the 84-year-old Grass dared to break the taboo. He spoke out and said “What Must Be Said.”

Yet why do I hesitate to name
that other land in which
for years—although kept secret—
a growing nuclear power has existed
beyond supervision or verification,
subject to no inspection of any kind?

The “NGOs” that spooked Egypt

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Cairo and Washington breathed a sigh of relief last month when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved military aid to Egypt. But their hopes for the future proved to be wishful thinking, as Egypt asked Interpol this week to issue red notices for the arrest of six Americans whom the Egyptians accuse of illegally stirring unrest. The Americans are all employees of three ostensibly private groups that Washington funds “to promote democracy” in Egypt and other countries. The State Department paid as much as $5 million in bail for the defendants, all of whom had to pledge to return for subsequent court proceedings. They did not do so, which legally makes them fugitives.

Washington is currently pressing Interpol to deny Egypt’s request, even as other countries in the region regard the American NGOs with suspicion. The United Arab Emirates has just banned one of the American groups, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and a similar group from Germany, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Observers are waiting to see if other countries will issue similar bans.

Abortion war hits Britain

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:00:00 +0000

Anti-abortion protests might seem as American as apple pie, but don’t be fooled. Activists from Texas have just laid siege to Britain, the country the Daily Mail has called the “the abortion capital of Europe.” And their American-style demonstrations outside the headquarters of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service recently led the group to warn that the new anti-abortion climate could spook future doctors from entering women’s health.

At the root of these protests is the devoutly Christian “40 Days for Life,” a Virginia-based organization that has been working hard to export American-style anti-abortion protests to other countries. The group had its start in 1998 when Planned Parenthood announced plans to build a clinic in College Station, the home of Texas A&M. According to the official history, a pharmaceutical salesman and religious Catholic named David Bereit rallied 60 churches of different denominations and thousands of people and “dramatically reduced abortions in the region.”

Does Obama’s baritone give him an edge?

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:51:00 +0000

What is it about Barack Obama's baritone?

Aside from the symbolism of finding a new hero who might displace the shame and fear that has poisoned American public life since Martin Luther King's murder in 1968, there is something in the very essence of Obama's voice -- its tone, its timbre, its resonance -- that has struck deep chords among Americans and foreigners in this year's campaign season. Not since King's "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 has a black American moved so many other Americans, white or black. And once the matter of voice was raised for Obama, a not always flattering parallel immediately arose concerning the voice of the first real female candidate in U.S. history: Hillary Clinton.

Eager to probe deeper into the chords of the candidates, I called two of the world's specialists on what moves us as listeners to others' voices, Lotfi Mansouri and Rick Harrell, who have coached singers at the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Conservatory opera program.

Mad cow madness

Fri, 08 Dec 2000 20:31:00 +0000

I recently stopped in at my favorite neighborhood bistro, where it's hard to spend more than 20 bucks on a brilliant meal, and Pascal gave me the bad news: If I wanted the ris de veau, this would be the last week. The guillotine of state was falling on this most prized of French delicacies.

Ris de veau, or sweetbreads, come from the thymus gland of a young cow or bull and are among the truly wondrous delights of old country cooking. Sweet. Succulent. Creamy. They harbor the texture of freshly plucked mushrooms but are as rich as liquid gold.

But ask for them here, right now, and most people will wonder if you've been bitten by a mad cow. Mad cows are everywhere, or at least on every newspaper front page, magazine cover and television news broadcast. And they are quickly herding their way across the continent as new cases of BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, have shown up in recent weeks in the slaughterhouses of Germany and Spain.

“Lives of the Psychics” and “The Second Creation”

Thu, 27 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000

It is hard to know which is the greater scandal: that Syracuse University awarded a full professorship to Fred Frohock or that the esteemed University of Chicago Press elected to publish his "Lives of the Psychics: The Shared Worlds of Science and Mysticism," a singularly banal, mush-minded assemblage of psychogibberish.

Let's start at the very beginning: the title. Evoking every Roman Catholic schoolchild's religious training, it prepares us for stories of extraordinary souls who, even if they are not saints, should mesmerize us with the grandeur of their experiences. Moreover, the subtitle leads us, C.S. Lewis-style, to expect an engagement or, at the very least, a rapprochement between the methods of science and the insights of faith. And what do we discover on Page 1 of the preface?

Frohock's daughter Christina has a nightmare. She is watching television and sees a plane crash that has taken her daddy, days before he is to fly away to a foreign country. Fact: The plane on which he had flown to Madrid did later crash. Lesson: Behold the psychic insight of little children into the unknown.

“What's Love Got To Do with It? A Critical Look at American Charity” by David Wagner

Fri, 04 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Just as I was finishing David Wagner's tightly argued essay on the history of American charity, out came a poll that seemed to confirm everything the sociologist was saying: Religion and its do-gooder stepchild, volunteerism, have all but smothered real political engagement in America.

The pollsters, who based their findings on a sampling of 800 college students, cited as typical the response of two undergraduates, a 24-year-old music student at UCLA who sings in hospitals and convalescent homes but eschews political action because it's "a time issue," and a 19-year-old Boston University lad who dismisses "the whole field of politics" because "it doesn't interest me much to get involved in such a hypocritical situation." Yet they found a high degree of what both they and the students identified as "civic-mindedness."

A bittersweet saga in Sicily

Sat, 09 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Oct. 9, 1999

Monte Alburchia, Sicily:

Our object was plain enough: to wind our way into these most superstitious and least touristed of mountain towns, the homeland of the Sicilian banditry that had helped give rise to the Mafia, to witness what had been described as a pagan harvest and fertility festival whose roots could be traced to Roman times, or possibly earlier.

Claudio, a Neapolitan architect friend of more than mildly pagan impulses, had been telling me about these simple festivals -- most of them Catholic underlain with obvious pagan elements -- since I first met him in Naples six years earlier. He had once taken me on a walk through the back streets of old Naples, where shrines to those suffering in the heat of purgatory mark nearly every block. "No Neapolitan really believes he will go to hell," Claudio had said, his voice twinkling, "so we suppose those people who have had some troubles will stay warm a while in purgatorio until the spirit world releases them." Although he called himself an atheist, he confessed that he had always been captivated by the icons and rituals dedicated to invisible spirits and other worlds -- which is why he often found himself drawn into ecstatic religious processions and ancient festivals. I knew immediately we were kindred spirits.

“The Coming of the Night”

Wed, 08 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

More than three decades have passed since John Rechy presented himself to American readers as the cartographer of homosexual abandon in his first novel, "City of Night." Now a respectable teacher of literature at UCLA and a winner of PEN West's Lifetime Achievement Award, Rechy has returned to the abject territory of the night.

Hands -- he had not seen whose, had not had a chance to choose, could not tell how many -- flung him back down on the ground. Mouths licked his body, his balls, his cock. A tongue jabbed into his ass. Cocks slapped his face, stinging his flesh. Hands spread his legs open, wide, wider, hurting, wider. A hand held a cracked ampule of amyl to his nose, cupping it there to enclose the rush ...
Somehow, this isn't quite the territory of the good gay Scout and his wing-tipped lobbyist from the Human Rights Campaign petitioning Congress for marriage rights between ensigns on the USS Missouri. Though Rechy regularly appears on the list of this country's best gay writers, his work is fundamentally at war with the current buffed and blow-dried gay rights movement. He has spent his life excavating the cracks at the periphery of American culture, feeling his way toward that place within each of us where the ecstatic teeters on the edge of psychic abyss. And yet this time, the track to the abyss feels worn down, a bit dusty, as though too many feet -- Rechy's included -- have trodden there before.
Continue Reading...

“Magnificent Corpses”

Thu, 05 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

I found my first preserved saint almost 20 years ago in Gubbio, a haunted stone hill town in Umbria. Her leathery remains rested peacefully on a red satin pillow inside the Duomo. What soft, delicate carving, I thought, assuming the thing within the holy garments to be a walnut replica of the saint -- until I noticed an unmistakable recess between the forearm and the wrist not quite covered by our lady's lace gloves. Exquisite. What better refuge from the breathless Tuscan sun than these occasional reflective communings with Italy's pago-Christian past?

Hiking back down the terraced streets from the Duomo, I found another view. Some 20, maybe 25 scruffy rockers were hanging around outside the local communist party youth center, swathed in the sweet smell of hash, waiting for ... almost anything to happen. The fine relic above seemed to cast little blessing on the unemployed below.

“The Elusive Embrace”

Thu, 03 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Had he not come of age in the 1980s, Daniel Mendelsohn, like Gore Vidal (who matured 40 years earlier), would surely have looked down his long straight nose at the teeming, sweating masses of New York's gay gym bunnies and decamped for the sublime and rocky shores of the Mediterranean. He is, after all, a scholar of ancient Greek and Latin, a speaker of most of the Romance languages as well as German and Yiddish and an apparently dashing swain who, he tells us, has no trouble picking up comely bundles of muscle wherever they are. But Mendelsohn, a 39-year-old refugee from the suburbs, does like (or has liked) a pumped physique and has spent his young adulthood residing in the city's hottest gay ghetto (he prefers the term "colony"), Chelsea. He is a tormented -- deliciously tormented -- prisoner of his times. His debut book, on desire, love and identity, though at times needlessly repetitious, is also one of the smartest meditations on American homosexual life in many years.