What the Postman Brings

(Gladys Horton as a teen. Photo Getty Images.)
 
I would rather think about the musical legacy of Gladys Horton, the lead singer of the Marvelettes who charted the first of the MoTown hits when I was just beginning to think about things beyond my grade school, and who made Detroit famous for something other than cars. She died yesterday at a Sherman Oaks, CA., nursing home where she was recovering from the effects of a stroke. I heard “Hey, Mr. Postman” as part of her obit and cannot get it out of my mind.
 

 
I was going to tell you a story about Vietnam today. There is some stuff going down there that is worth talking about, and I have a couple really good recipes that I need to walk you through while we are still making lists for the store to stock up for the Superbowl.
 
Oh well, we live in the world we do, and here goes. I am pretty sure there will be an Internet tomorrow, at least here, even if the Strong Guy that rules Egypt has taken his nation off the net.
 
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Cairo this morning, following similar riots in Sana, capital of Yemen yesterday. That is among the poorest of Arab states, and Cairo is the largest.
 
Secular and Islamist Egyptian opposition leaders supported large-scale protests after prayers on Friday. The Authorities responded first by shutting down the social media sites, the Blackberry network and finally the Internet itself on Wednesday, but the word had already been passed to the street.
 
In this technical age, it is a breathtaking demonstration of ham-handed resolve on the part of the government. Forcing the revolution to communicate by mailman won’t put the lid on it, any more than the truncheons and rubber bullets and water cannons the used against the demonstrators. The cops even doused the man of the hour, Mohamed Mustafa ElBaradei.


(Former Atomic Energy Commission Chair ElBaradei. Photo Wikipedia.)
 
He is a cultured guy, a man of the world, so if he is to be the Man on Horseback, maybe that presages some positive outcome. But I don’t know. We will have to see whether is the real deal of another charlatan.
 
I had a brief chat with a colleague emeritus from the Air Force who was around for the installation of the generally friendly despots who have ruled each country with firm, if not brutal, hands for the last three decades.
 
The Colonel remembered what happened in Yemen, long ago.
 

(President almost-for-life Saleh of Yemen. Photo NY Daily News.)
 
“I remember when Saleh became President,” He said.  “I was part of a small American party that visited Sanaa from the European Command HQ in Stuttgart.  My boss, Major General Ed Partain, USA, led our group. We had just set up an Office of Military Cooperation which working for the Ambassador, provided the staffing for the Security Assistance program.  The US had just given a half dozen F-5 aircraft to Yemen, and the aircraft were to be the stars of their annual military demonstration day.”
 
He looked off to a distance I could not see.
 
“The Soviets were there to include their Ambassador and a senior General; I sat across from the Ambassador at lunch and he looked and acted like Khrushchev – a true member of the Proletariat.” The Colonel smiled ironically.
 
“The rumor was that prior to his becoming President, Saleh had two jobs, one as a Major in the Yemeni Army in the morning and then drove a taxi in the afternoons. And of course at “cocktail hour”, the entire male population sat around and chewed qat (khat), enjoying it’s narcotic affect – which they still do.”
 
I nodded. “It is endemic to the culture,” I agreed. “And don’t plan on getting anything except mischief done after lunch.”
 
The Colonel laughed. “It was also about that time,” he said, “maybe a year earlier, that I visited Egypt on their Armed Forces day and sat in a reviewing stand in which Anwar Sadat was the presiding official.  It was in this stand exactly one year later that he was assassinated in 1981. That is what produced Hosni Mubarak.”
 
“I visited the same spot in 1989,” I said. “I have a picture of it somewhere,” gesturing at the pile of albums and data discs littering my desk.
 
“What goes around,” said the Colonel. “I told you the other day that democracy may not be the universal good news answer for our national security, but that is what we have been peddling for the last several Administrations, and we are stuck with it.”
 
“So we trade security for our ideals and reap the consequences of what is going to sweep into the vacuum left by the departure of the strong men.”
 
“President Obama’s tepid defense of Hosni Mubarak is eerily like Jimmy carter’s lukewarm support for the Shah of Iran during the return of the Ayatollah. You will recall what followed.”
 
I nodded slowly, wondering what exactly is going to come next.  With Gladys gone, and the Internet cut off, I guess we will just have to wait for the Postman and see what he has in his sack.
 
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
vicsocotra.com | Subscribe to the RSS feed!