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Batty, Francis de Witt (1879–1961)
Francis de Witt Batty, n.d.
State Library of Queensland
Francis de Witt Batty (1879-1961), Anglican bishop, was born on 10 January 1879 at Waltham Green, London, youngest son of Rev. William Edmund Batty and his wife Frances Beatrice, née Jebb. Named after his mother's ancestor, the Dutch patriot Jan de Witt, he was usually known by his second name. Waltham was a poor parish and in 1892 his father accepted the living of Finchley in a residential district of London. The change of surroundings and his education at St Paul's School in 1890-97 helped to give him that ease of movement amid the governing classes which was to be one of his chief characteristics. He entered Balliol College, Oxford, graduating with a second-class in Litterae Humaniores in 1902 (M.A., 1905).
Balliol exercised a decisive influence on Batty who responded with a lifelong affection for the college. He was a wide and intelligent reader all through his life; he was not a professional scholar but Oxford gave him a sound understanding of philosophy, classical literature and some history. More important, he made friends with men who were to be future leaders in church and state, became aware of Britain's imperial obligations and opportunities, and acquired that sense of high moral responsibility combined with an aloofness of manner and a rueful acknowledgment of the weaknesses of lesser mortals which he always retained.
Family influence and the impression made by a junior undergraduate, William Temple, later archbishop of Canterbury, were important in Batty's decision to enter the Church. He declined an offer to read theology at Balliol and in 1902 entered Wells Theological College. Here he obtained an insight into the corporate spiritual life, was grounded in liberal religious learning and came to disdain those Church 'parties' whose contests were then particularly virulent. On 4 October 1903 he was made deacon and became an assistant curate at Hornsey, a London suburb. His vicar, St Clair Donaldson, gave Batty thorough tuition in his craft. When Donaldson was appointed bishop of Brisbane in 1904, Batty went as his domestic chaplain and secretary. Priested by the Bishop of London on 29 May he reached Brisbane on 19 December.
Batty lived at the official residence with the bachelor archbishop and was soon asked to assist in much of the administration of the diocese. He also helped at the cathedral, took religious instruction classes and in 1909-16 edited the Brisbane Church Chronicle and lectured at St Francis's (Theological) College. Significantly, he accompanied Donaldson, and sometimes represented him, at meetings with governors, politicians and ecclesiastics. He acquired a wide knowledge of the workings of church and state, an easy familiarity, which he treasured, with important people, and a somewhat Olympian attitude, enhanced by his quizzical sense of humour, to local problems and personalities. He probably learned little about 'grass-roots' conditions—his attitude to local radicalism and later to the conscription referenda made this evident.
Although he could never wholly identify himself with Queensland, Batty's sense of commitment became deeper. He was made sub-dean and canon residentiary of St John's Cathedral in 1916, and as such took over the whole responsibility for the running of the cathedral and was closely involved in the St Martin's War Memorial Hospital Appeal. He spoke frequently in the diocesan synod and represented his diocese in the wider councils of the Church. While lamenting what seemed to be a decline in standards, he worked vigorously for the Australian College of Theology, becoming a fellow in 1924. He published pamphlets on Church reunion and the ministry of healing. When Donaldson was translated to Salisbury in 1921, Batty, though severely tempted, chose not to follow him home. His relations with the new archbishop, Gerald Sharp, were generally good. With Rev. C. T. Dimont, he publicly stated his debt to his mentor in St. Clair Donaldson … (London, 1939). Meanwhile, his links with Queensland became stronger. On 7 January 1925 he married Elizabeth Meredith Davis (1893-1972), matron of St Martin's Hospital. That year he became dean of Brisbane and in 1930 succeeded his friendly rival H. F. Le Fanu as coadjutor bishop. He retained his deanship and acted as administrator of the diocese in Sharp's absence.
Batty was elected bishop of Newcastle, New South Wales, and enthroned on 3 March 1931. He thought it 'the most enviable diocese in Australia': compact in area but varied in composition, with a strong intellectual tradition, a good supply of clergy and a large endowment in a pastoral property. He had family ties with the district and had long venerated the founder-bishop William Tyrrell. He rejected the chance of becoming bishop of Adelaide in 1941.
In depression-ridden Newcastle, Batty encouraged the registrar and diocesan trustees to reduce reliance on the endowment and to provide for greater financial responsibility by the parishes. While this policy freed funds for special projects and promoted parochial self-reliance, it bore hardly on the weaker areas. He was less successful in coping directly with the problems of people in mining parishes—he lacked the common touch of his predecessor G. M. Long but was made acutely aware of the challenge to the Church posed by current social issues.
Batty found at St John's College, Morpeth, a group of scholars, including E. H. Burgmann, Roy Lee and A. P. Elkin, who, in a series of publications, were trying to relate Christianity to modern developments in sociology, politics and international affairs. His meeting with Temple during a visit to Britain in 1933 stimulated his own thinking on these lines. In 1955 the college came under the sole control of Newcastle and he hoped that a connexion would be set up with the new university college. Under him Newcastle became a focal point for earnest thinking about contemporary issues in a Christian context. During World War II the Christian Social Order Movement received strong support and Batty himself, stimulated by a Roman Catholic journalist and under the enthusiastic patronage of the governor, Lord Wakehurst, initiated 'Religion and Life Week'. Batty became a radio broadcaster of distinction, although he failed to secure a licence for a Church radio station at Newcastle. At the 1948 Lambeth Conference, he played a considerable part in social justice discussions and was not committed to a distinct secular position. His (Bishop) Moorhouse lectures in 1939 had made it clear that he held to traditional propositions; they were published as Human Nature (Sydney, 1941). He criticized the conservative stance in theology and politics but he was also a strong critic of some Labor government policies of the 1940s.
Batty was associated with Donaldson in early discussions for reform of the 'legal nexus' between Australian dioceses and the Church of England and emerged as a proponent of the draft constitution first tabled in 1926. Although consistently English in his loyalties, he actively opposed those who feared the jurisdictional independence of an Australian Anglican tribunal. He always disliked extremes of churchmanship and the ecclesiastical quarrels motivated by them. In the later 1940s he supported strongly, though with some compunction, Bishop Wylde of Bathurst in the 'Red Book' case, fearing a revival of divisions over ritual. By 1945 Batty had emerged as the 'minister in charge of the Bill' (as he termed himself). Despite patient negotiation he had to confess by 1950 that the prospect of agreement seemed remote, but enough consensus was reached in 1955 for legislative action to begin. He was widely regarded as one of the principal architects of the constitution which was received in 1961. He also favoured an ecumenical approach and was a persistent exponent of discussions about Christian reunion. From 1937 he belonged to a group of Anglican and Protestant churchmen who studied possible bases of agreement, although he remained reluctant to proceed too rapidly.
In the 1950s Batty remained active, travelling overseas, and promoting new lines of Christian thought. It is probable that his diocese, faced with post-war problems of expansion and finance, would have benefited more by his direct attention, but he became increasingly content to leave these affairs to his subordinates. He did not resign until 1958, when he was in his eightieth year, and then presided over the synod which elected his successor. Batty lived in quite active retirement at Double Bay, Sydney. Survived by his wife, he died on 3 April 1961 and was buried in Morpeth cemetery, next to W. Tyrrell, whom he had commemorated in a short play, and whose centenary of appointment he had celebrated with much ceremony in 1947.
A. P. Elkin, The Diocese of Newcastle (Syd, 1955)
Church of England (Brisbane), Reports of the Proceedings of Synod, 1904-30, and General Synod, Proceedings, 1905-60
‘Synod reports’, Church of England, Diocese of Newcastle Year Book, 1930-58
F. de W. Batty, Memoirs (Diocesan Registry, Newcastle)
Batty papers (St James's Church, Sydney)
Elgin papers (privately held)
Verney papers (privately held)
Wakehurst papers (State Library of New South Wales)
Wylde-Batty correspondence (Diocesan Registry, Bathurst, New South Wales).
Taylor, Alexander John (brother-in-law)
K. J. Cable, 'Batty, Francis de Witt (1879–1961)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/batty-francis-de-witt-5155/text8649, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 16 July 2019.
Anglican bishop
magazine/journal editor
radio religious broadcaster
religious writer
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Grattan, Clinton Hartley (1902–1980)
by Laurie Hergenhan
Clinton Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), journalist, author, historian and commentator on foreign affairs, was born on 19 October 1902 at Wakefield, near Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, son of Leonard Grattan, journeyman baker, and his wife Laura, née Campbell, both from Nova Scotia, Canada. His forebears were Scots, English, Irish and French-Swiss, the patronymic supposedly being changed from Gratteau to Grattan. Hartley deeply admired his maternal grandfather, a subsistence farmer and mineworker. His family background contributed to his pro-labour views and to his sense of being something of an 'outsider' in American society, though he always identified strongly, if critically, with the better aspects of American democracy.
Failing to gain a place at Harvard University, Grattan nevertheless valued his Alma Mater, Clark College, Clark University (A.B., 1923), Worcester. His most influential teacher was Harry Elmer Barnes, a polymath and a crusader for radical causes. Grattan saw himself as inheriting the left-liberalism of Barnes and others who sought to harness the social sciences in a struggle for social justice. By temperament, background and education, Grattan became a dissenter with a liking for combative polemics and a belief in ranging across the disciplines. He was a proponent of American cultural independence in the debates of the 1920s and subsequently a supporter of parallel impulses in Australian culture.
In 1925 he took up journalism in New York, having already begun writing iconoclastic articles on American literary figures for H. L. Mencken's American Mercury. On 22 October 1926, in New York, Grattan married with Unitarian forms Beatrice Kuper, an actress who used 'Kay' as her stage surname; they were to be divorced in 1937. He published three books in 1929 and more followed. While pursuing a career as an Americanist, he had visited Australia in 1927 when he accompanied Beatrice who was touring with the musical, Sunny. He devoted himself to learning about the 'new' country—which he felt could not be as dull as it seemed—by collecting books and reading widely in its literature. Although he made no contact with the intellectual community, he regarded Australia as a fascinating 'experiment' in democracy. The outcome was a slim booklet, Australian Literature (Seattle, 1929), one of the earliest attempts to synthesize nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary history so as to establish what was characteristically 'Australian'.
His essay earned the immediate interest of such writers as Miles Franklin, Nettie Palmer and Katharine Susannah Prichard because it detected a promise of distinctiveness in Australian literature and did not see it as a branch of Anglo-European culture. In his voluminous later writing, much of it in leading New York journals and newspapers, he expanded his interests into socio-cultural questions, politics, economics and international relations. The span and tone of his work appealed to Australian artists and intellectuals who promoted their country's independence in the 1930s and 1940s.
Among them were people whom Grattan met on his next and most substantial visit to Australia—made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation—in December 1936-September 1938: besides Franklin, Palmer and Prichard, he met Bert Evatt, Brian Fitzpatrick, Brian Penton, Sir Herbert Gepp, Percy Stephensen, Keith Duncan, William Macmahon Ball, and the economists Colin Clark and (Sir) John Crawford, his friend thereafter. Through Geoffrey Remington, Grattan forged links with the Australian Institute of Political Science. He published influential articles in the institute's journal, the Australian Quarterly, on Joseph Furphy (as an inspirational radical nationalist) and on Australian society's lack of self-definition and direction. Grattan lamented the country's conservatism in the late 1930s.
Following a speculative and influential article, 'An Australian-American Axis?' in Harper's Magazine (May 1940), he again visited Australia for nearly two months in 1940. His brief was to report on wartime conditions and opinion in Australasia. He produced a 49-page typescript, 'Australia and New Zealand Today', which was confidentially circulated in both countries, and which summed up their situations and future possibilities. Introducing Australia (New York, 1942) resulted from both his 1936-38 and 1940 tours. An accessible, professionally informed, generalist study, the book was widely read and served not only to introduce Australia to Americans, but, as Franklin pointed out, to interest Australians in their own country. It also appealed to younger nationalists, such as Geoffrey Serle and Stephen Murray-Smith.
In the mid- and late 1930s Grattan had moved farther to the left, without becoming a communist supporter. He married a former sweetheart Marjorie Sinclair Campbell on 3 June 1939 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In January 1942 he was appointed an analyst with the Board of Economic Warfare, Washington, a sign at last of his official recognition as an American expert on Australian affairs. Chaired by Martin Dies, a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives (which was investigating un-American activities) accused Grattan of being both a communist and a Nazi sympathizer, forcing him to resign in April. This bitter disappointment threw him back on freelance journalism in New York. He consequently experienced financial difficulties and moved with his family to nearby Katonah.
After being employed by the Ford Foundation in the 1950s, Grattan produced The Southwest Pacific to 1900 and The Southwest Pacific Since 1900 (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1963) which he and Sir Keith Hancock regarded as his magnum opus. The work was an ambitious synthesis and drew on a lifetime's study. It was well received, but some reviewers pointed out its limitations as a generalist history in which the component parts—Australia, New Zealand, 'the Islands' and Antarctica—tended to coexist separately. The approach, especially in 'the Islands', lacked a post-colonial perspective that characterized the work of later historians.
In 1964 the University of Texas at Austin bought Grattan's vast collection of Australiana and South Pacificana, which had become legendary among his steady stream of visitors from Australia. He accepted a post at the university as curator of his collection, with some lecturing duties in history; later made professor, he retired in 1974. On his seventh and final visit to Australia in 1977, he received an honorary LL.D. from the Australian National University in belated recognition of his contribution to the study of Australian culture. Survived by his wife, and their son and three daughters, he died on 25 June 1980 at Austin.
Grattan's wish that his ashes be scattered over Sydney Harbour testified to his extraordinarily enduring attachment to Australia. The country's most important foreign observer, he was, as Serle has said, its most persistent, productive and embracing.
D. Oliphant (ed), Perspectives on Australia (Austin, Texas, US, 1989)
L. Hergenhan, No Casual Traveller (Brisb, 1995), and for publications
Meanjin Quarterly, 33, no 3, Sept 1974, p 229
Overland, 121, Summer 1990, p 70
J. J. Healy, Bibliography of Grattan's Writings (manuscript) and Grattan papers (Grattan Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin).
Henry, Alice (friend)
Franklin, Stella Maria Sarah Miles (friend)
Laurie Hergenhan, 'Grattan, Clinton Hartley (1902–1980)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/grattan-clinton-hartley-10343/text18311, published first in hardcopy 1996, accessed online 16 July 2019.
Wakefield, Massachusetts, United States of America
Austin, Texas, United States of America
Australiana collector
contemporary-affairs commentator
historian (general)
literary critic
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2014, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, 169 min, USA, Dir: Christopher Nolan
In the not-too-distant future, life on Earth can no longer sustain itself. It’s up to Cooper, a pilot-turned reluctant farmer-turned astronaut, to lead a team into space to look for new worlds to inhabit. Combining family drama with eye-popping visuals and mind-expanding philosophical inquiry, Nolan’s sci-fi epic stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow and Michael Caine and won an Oscars for its stunning visual effects. “An enormous undertaking that, like all the director’s best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, “Interstellar” reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside THE WIZARD OF OZ, 2001, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and GRAVITY in the canon of Hollywood’s visionary sci-fi head trips.” - Scott Foundas, Variety.
Emma Thomas
Lynda Obst
Jonathan Nolan
Hoyte Van Hoytema
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Stories indexed with the term ‘seventh hour’
Column: The Case for Free Public Schools
By Ruth Kraut
Earlier this week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan – along with two plaintiffs – filed suit against the Ann Arbor Public Schools for the school district’s plan to charge students who want to take a seventh class in a semester.
Ruth Kraut
The lawsuit argues that the Michigan Constitution requires a free public education for all Michigan students, and that charging for a seventh hour is unconstitutional. Kary Moss, ACLU of Michigan executive director, outlined the position in an ACLU press release: “Allowing this model to continue will open the floodgates for any district in the state to charge for every conceivable part of their students’ education creating a two-tiered system in which students who have money get ahead, while those who do not fall behind.”
In early June, I wrote my first column for The Chronicle, about three aspects of the AAPS budget proposal. ["Column: Disparate Impact of AAPS Cuts?"] One of the areas I wrote about was seventh hour, a term that refers to the option of taking a seventh class during a semester, rather than the more standard six classes.
I was concerned about issues of equity – about Skyline students being able to acquire 7.5 credits in a year without paying, while Pioneer and Huron students could only earn 6 credits in a year for free. I was concerned about students losing access to the arts. I was concerned about disparate impacts.
I assumed that – as with many other proposals – this idea was poorly conceived, but legal.
A couple of days after my column was published in The Chronicle, I talked with the ACLU’s Kary Moss. (Full disclosure: Kary is a friend of mine, and we frequently discuss education issues. And that first Ann Arbor Chronicle column ended up as “Exhibit 4” in the ACLU complaint.)
Kary suggested to me that she was concerned about seventh hour, too – because she believed the move to charge tuition was unconstitutional.
Unconstitutional?! That thought had not even occurred to me. [Full Story]
Column: Disparate Impact of AAPS Cuts?
Editor’s note: This marks the launch of a new column in The Chronicle, focused on Ann Arbor Public Schools and other educational issues. Readers might know Ruth Kraut from her commentary on Ann Arbor Schools Musings, where she’s been writing about these issues for several years. For recent background on The Chronicle’s coverage of AAPS, see “Milestone: Why You Keep Running a Marathon.”
Next week, the board of the Ann Arbor Public Schools will need to cut about 5% from the district’s budget. That’s a reduction of about $8.6 million. Teachers have already taken a 3% pay cut.
Per-pupil funding for next year ($9,025) will be less than the per-pupil funding of 12 years ago in 2001-2002 ($9,034). So it’s no surprise that we’re at the point where cuts are painful. Cutting teachers, cutting programs – none of it is happy news. There will be consequences. The question is, what kind of consequences?
In the civil rights world, a “disparate impact” occurs when a policy is non-discriminatory in its intent but affects a “protected class” of people in a disproportionate way. In Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, for example, these protected classes include race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, and marital status.
AAPS is a district with a large achievement gap – between white students and African American and Hispanic/Latino students. And this gap has persisted for many years. Although in state civil rights law, income is not a protected status, income is highly correlated with race, age, and marital status. District-wide, there is also an achievement gap that is related to income: Poor kids are more likely to do poorly in school.
So it’s important to consider the AAPS budget from a perspective of potential disparate impacts. On the surface, the proposed budget cuts treat all students equally. But if we look deeper, would we find that certain budget cuts worsen – or perhaps improve – the achievement gap?
Three proposed budget cuts have raised a significant amount of opposition this year: (1) eliminating high school transportation; (2) cutting reading intervention teachers; and (3) cutting seventh hour or making it a tuition-only option. Together, these three account for just under $1.5 million of the $8.6 million in cuts. Do these cuts, in particular, have a disparate impact on any groups? [Full Story]
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Building values-based leadership and civic engagement in California’s youth is important to me. That is why I am proud to volunteer for California YMCA Youth & Government.
California YMCA Youth & Government has provided outstanding statewide educational and social experiences close to 100,000 middle and high school youth for more than 70 years.
Together we can achieve so much more. Every gift makes a difference. Everyone has a role to play. Please join me and give today.
Join George's Team!
Team YMCA
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Tyler Wright
YMCA of Greater Long Beach
Glendale YMCA
Home Start a Team Join a Team Register as a Campaigner Give Contact Us
The mission of California YMCA Youth & Government is to build values-based leadership and civic engagement in California’s youth to strengthen our democracy.
©2019 YMCA of the USA. All rights reserved.
http://www.facebook.com/YOUTHandGOVERNMENT,http://www.twitter.com/calymca,http://www.youtube.com/user/calymca The mission of California YMCA Youth & Government is to build values-based leadership and civic engagement in California’s youth to strengthen our democracy.
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UH Habitat for Humanity designs 'ultimate playhouse'
Katie McEvily
A playhouse would have been a unique addition to this year's Frontier Fiesta, but a lack of funds has put a damper on the festivities.
Since last semester, the University of Houston Habitat for Humanity has worked on designs for an ultimate play space. This playhouse was meant to be constructed for display at Frontier Fiesta, where interested buyers could bid on it during a silent auction.
With only a week left to build and still no resources, however, Habitat was forced to change its plans.
"It didn't happen because we'd been looking for donations, and kind of surprisingly, we didn't get any," said Habitat president Damola Osinulu. "It would have been really great if we had been able to build it, but we really had no funds. Simply because of the nature of the organization, we have to rely on other people to fund us."
The idea for a playhouse came about after the Architecture Alumni Association approached Habitat for volunteers on its second annual Archis' Icehouse at Frontier Fiesta. In return for contributing time and manpower to the festival booth, Habitat could promote its mission to the entire campus and possibly raise money for future projects.
"We've been looking for a way to get more UH students involved in (Habitat) activities, not just architecture students," Osinulu said. "I think there is room for improvement among the UH community."
The playhouse was also intended as a way to make Frontier Fiesta a more family-oriented affair.
"When you think about it, a lot of UH students are actually people with children," Osinulu added. "We thought this was a great way to have something for the kids."
The group of committed volunteer designers wanted their concept of the ultimate playhouse to be fresh and inventive.
The first schematic design centered around a reconfigureable system. Moveable components could be added or subtracted according to the size of the owner's backyard or the age of the child. Osinulu said the whole idea was that the play station wouldn't be a set system, but rather a system that could grow and change with a child's growth.
Based on a 9-foot cubic area surrounding the playhouse, final plans incorporated all the desired flexibility in a framework of four inch, by four inch, by 10 foot wood posts.
A treehouse would top off the play area. From there a child could explore other elements like crawling through a tube, climbing a cargo net, exiting on a slide or bobbing on a see-saw. The entire structure would also be set within a sandbox, again accommodating different age groups. As with any project, Habitat dealt with endless design possibilities.
"We had enough to start building, but a lot of the discovery, I think, would have been while we were building," Osinulu said. "But that's part of the fun. After all, it was also supposed to be a fun project for Habitat members."
Seeking donations from local lumberyards proved unsuccessful for the group. Osinulu admitted the budget was a bit too high, but certain factors could not be ignored. For instance, the necessary posts for construction had to be weather-treated, a more expensive type of wood.
Despite the contribution setbacks, Habitat has completed the designs and will be displaying them at Archis' Icehouse. Following earlier plans to auction the playhouse, a computer-rendered model and ink drawings will be set up for those wishing to make a silent bid.
Osinulu said the change in plans could not have worked out any better for the organization. From the sale, Habitat will keep the leftover funds to expand membership and avoid future predicaments that retard construction efforts. And until there is a buyer, deadline pressure is no longer an issue.
"Now we won't have to rush through the work," Osinulu said. "It's a fun experience, not just a tedious exercise."
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Tears for a Colonel
I've already written about becoming more wistful, misty-eyed since beginning HRT in June, but I had not experienced the torrent of uncontrollable tears that I have heard others describe. That changed today.
This morning I had a beautiful waking dream. It must have been 1970 or 1971, and in my dream I woke in the basement family room of my oldest sister's house in Oxon Hill, MD. I was on one of her orange couches, where I always slept when we came to visit. My nephew, then scarcely ten years old came bouncing into the room, and I thought he looked so funny in his plastic frame glasses. (That's the pot calling the kettle black, as I also wore large plastic frame glasses back then.) Then my brother-in-law breezed in, running to grab something from the back, followed by my sister. I felt so wonderful that I both laughed and cried to think what wonderful times those were even if I was not able to talk to anyone about my deepest troubles.
I woke fully to find myself in my bed here in Bucharest, happily sobbing uncontrollably and not able to stop. I would just get the tears to slow, and then I would think of my nephew again as he was in those days and as the fine man he has become. Again I was reaching for the Kleenex.
My nephew is a full army colonel today with his own family and young children. He has not said so to me directly, but I don't think he fully approves of these changes in his uncle. That's OK. I remember how he cried at my wedding in 1982, and my own tears start again.
By the time the floodgates closed, I had a large pile of Kleenex on the floor. I got up, dressed, and went for an easy early morning bike ride around the Bucharest Sea.
Now, as I write these words, my eyes again become misty. This is for you, nephew, tears for a colonel.
CSC: The Only Limitations Are the Ones You Bring with You -- or -- So How Far Back Does This Go? (Part 5)
Back from my first overseas adventure in the Soviet Union, in the fall of 1978 I was out of graduate school and in need of a job. At the time I thought I would just find something, anything, that would allow me to get by for two or three years and figure things out. Little did I know I was about to enter upon a career that lasted more than 25 years.
There it was, a full page ad in the Washington Post in August or September of 1978:
Wanted: Physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians with BS or higher degrees who know a little about programming to work on contracts with Goddard Space Flight Center.
I'm sure the real words of that ad were punchier, but that was the gist of it. I interviewed in October and started work the Monday after Thanksgiving, moving to Maryland and finding a room in a shared group house. On $14,000/year starting salary, I couldn't afford an apartment of my own.
CSC loved slogans. "CSC: Part of it, proud of it," was the most common one in corporate advertisements and on posters, but the one I liked most was:
CSC: The only limitations are the ones you bring with you.
How funny I thought that slogan was then, how much like the Soviet propaganda I had seen everywhere that summer. As the years went by, however, I came to see it not just as funny, but also as an ironically truthful description of my own life.
I've already described the fun I had through the years at CSC doing flight dynamics and attitude determination for missions starting with Magsat and ending with Hubble Space Telescope. I'm still friends with several of the people I met on my first day on the job in 1978, and some of them may be reading this today. Although we decry the heartlessness of corporate America, I felt that at least in work, I had a family, a wonderful group of people to work with and to laugh with.
Part of our "Tacky" Crew on the PASS Project for Hubble Space Telescope
In my personal life, I was willing myself to be normal. Here I am, at the start of a new job, living on my own with my own income, and with a clear path ahead if only. . . .
Lifespring, one of the EST-like self-improvement programs of the early 1980s, became the rage at CSC in 1980. One of the senior CSC analysts, in fact the very one who had interviewed me in 1978, took me out to lunch, trying to talk me into signing up for "The Basic." I resisted, but then he got me. "I know what your life is like," he said. "You go home to your hobbies, but I don't think you have ever gone on a date. You are all alone." I still said no, but then to spite him called Lifespring myself and registered the next day.
Over the next year I did the whole program. "The Basic" was followed by "IPE intermediate" and then "TC advanced." I now look back and think of Lifespring as psychology without a license conducted by charismatic facilitators whose real loyalty is to the company's bottom line, but Lifespring influenced me in dramatic ways that set my path for better or worse -- and I really do mean for both the very best and the very worst -- for years to come.
In the "TC advanced" program, we had small groups in which we were to help each other on our most important personal issues. Of course, I said not a word about the issue, but I willingly jumped at my group's suggestion that what I needed most was to date as many women as I could over the months of the program. No one could believe that I was still a virgin, in fact had never masturbated, and had never been on a real date. I became the group's mascot, as both the men and women urged me on, encouraging me at every step. I loved the attention, and I more than anyone else wanted this to work. "Surely my problem is that I have never even tried to live a normal life, isn't it? Surely if I start to meet women as men meet women, I will find what it is that I have never felt or understood?" Or, as Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote so simply two decades later, surely "Love will cure me?"
I filled and overfulfilled the plan. Well, OK, I was no Casanova, but over three or four months I had gone on at least a dozen full-fledged dates. My small group was all over me with cheers and hugs the day I announced I had lost my virginity.
So what was wrong with this picture? The night when I gave up my virginity, I felt it was all backwards. The roles were wrong. I did everything to give pleasure that I had read or been told about, but when the time came for my own pleasure, I found I couldn't care less. I wanted to be caressed and held in the way I had been doing the holding and caressing. As my partner started to look and wonder what was wrong, I closed my eyes and imagined a complete role reversal. Only then was I able to continue. That's the way it was that night, and that's the way it has been ever since. Of course, I said not a word. Surely, with time this will change?
I remember being taken one evening to Shepherd Park, a raw strip club on Georgia Avenue near the DC line. I had never been to such a club before. As the friend who brought me sat back with his beer to enjoy the show, I looked around and saw that the other guys in the dark club seemed to be having a wonderful time watching, tipping, and yelling encouragement to the dancers. I felt nothing, just a sense of wonder that anyone would come to such a show and commiseration with the bored expressions on the faces of the dancers. But I had earned another stripe on my road to normalcy.
Finally, one evening I was in the Lifespring office, making calls to people who had been to a guest event, trying to convince them to sign up for the full program. It was a slimy job that I did not enjoy, but eventually I made one call that was different. The young woman who answered had a slight accent, so after the Lifespring pitch, I asked where she was from. I found out she was a history graduate student doing research for a Ph.D. I forgot about Lifespring and started to talk about my own travels in the Soviet Union. We met face to face several weeks later at another Lifespring event, and eventually I invited her for dinner and to see the full six-hour Soviet film version of "War and Peace." I joined her at a political rally protesting U.S. involvement in Nicaragua or wherever it was that we were intervening at the time. "Wow," I thought, "Maybe this is what it's about, friendship based on mutual interests and caring?"
We were married in the summer of 1982. It was the best and worst decision of my life, and I suspect my spouse would say the same. We have a wonderful grown son, now age 22 and quite the independent, cultured, graceful, successful young man that every parent dreams of. We loved, we cried, we took care of aging relatives in their final days, and we made our home in Silver Spring the envy of our neighbors through never ending fix-it projects and renovations.
I entered the marriage without saying a word about my internal struggle, so convinced I was that through marriage and love and building a family, I would cure myself. "It" would simply go away, never to trouble me again. I could not have been more wrong. . . .
This is all I will say concerning my marriage that lasted from 1982 through 2007, although our divorce was final only in 2010 and was followed by post-divorce litigation that lasted into this year. I will, of course, write about what happened to me and the consequences through these years, but I respect my ex-spouse's privacy and feelings. I will never mention her name, where she came from, where she is today, or anything else that could even hint at her identity. I can only hope that someday there will be peace between us, that we can be in the same room for our son's marriage or for the birth of a grandchild.
How We Kidnapped Irina Nita
Did you know that we kidnapped Irina Nita? Now, before any of my Romanian readers call the police or ask Interpol to put out an all points bulletin, I hasten to inform you that Irina asked us to kidnap her. We only complied with her request by hijacking the Washington portion of the International Visitors Leadership (IVL) program that has just taken her to the U.S. for three weeks.
My readers outside Romania are probably asking, "Who is Irina Nita and what is this about kidnapping and hijacking?" Let me explain.
Irina Nita is executive director of ACCEPT, the Romanian national NGO for advancement of LGBT rights. I've had some involvement with ACCEPT for several months now, but I only met Irina about three weeks ago when I sat down to interview her for my U.S. Embassy report on the current situation and prospects for transgender individuals in Romania. At the end of our conversation, I asked if there was anything I could do for her, and she proceeded to tell me that she hopes to organize a specialist conference on transgender legal and medical issues in Bucharest next year. She said should would like to have American participation in this workshop but had no knowledge of or contacts in the U.S. transgender community. She asked if I could help her. She then added that she was about to travel to the U.S. on an IVL program sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
That was all I needed to get started on a hijack plan, but I knew I could not do it alone. I'm a beginner at this sort of thing, and I needed professional help for an operation of this sort. I turned to my "Oceans Eleven" team consisting of Anne Vonhof at the Office of Personnel Management, Chloe Schwenke at USAID, Shannon Doyle at MAGIC-DC, and my good Foreign Service friend Kay. They assembled the list of U.S. experts on transgender issues for Irina to meet. Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (GLIFAA) with leadership from Policy Chief Paul Kim anointed us an ad-hoc GLIFAA committee. With that title, I approached the Public Diplomacy office at Embassy Bucharest. I got a cool reception at first and was told that Irina's schedule was already fixed with little possibility for change. I insisted, however, and they sent on our list of additional meetings to the program office in Washington.
A few days later I received an e-mail from Meg Poole at Meridian House. Meg, it turns out, was in charge of Irina's program. Not only was the Washington portion of the program not fixed, Meg was having trouble reaching anyone to set up meetings during the summer vacation season. Anne jumped right in with names and telephone numbers for people she knew were available. Mara Keisling from the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) started calling Meg as well, saying she was ready to meet Irina at almost any time or place. Kay stepped forward to host a luncheon for Irina with a number of transgender activists and specialists in attendance. In the end, we got transgender-related meetings set up for Irina at the Human Rights Campaign, USAID, NCTE, the Whitman Walker Clinic, and at a number of other organizations and government offices.
Irina will also travel to Atlanta, San Francisco, Des Moines, Atlanta, and Albany, New York, on what will be mainly an LGB itinerary. The Washington component, however, now has a decidedly T shade that it would not have had otherwise. At Irina's request we successfully cracked our way into an existing USG program and rearranged the parts. Never before have I so thoroughly enjoyed being part of a hijacking.
Travel well, Irina. Drum bun. It's "wheels up" in Bucharest. We'll see you in a few weeks.
PS -- Anne Vonhof managed to open more closed doors for us in Washington than I thought possible. The next time I stand in front of a locked bank vault, I want Anne next to me to speak the magic words.
Under Transylvanian Moons -- or -- So How Far Back Does This Go? (Part 4)
I just spent a weekend near Sighisoara in the heart of Transylvania. It was a homecoming of sorts to a place I never thought I would see again. I was there once before, 33 years ago to the week in August 1978.
This brings me to the second passion of my life, one that helped me to survive and find meaning when I was not yet ready to come to terms with myself. When I left UVa in 1976, I was at the start of my first great personal purge even if at the time I did not know that this was the term. Having failed to overcome my fears in college, I decided I could will this away if I just worked hard enough at it. That would be much simpler, wouldn't it, than coming out and dealing with the consequences? Over the next two years of graduate school at Yale, I was able to keep that resolve, more or less, but my interest in astronomy and in almost everything else waned. After two years, I decided that was it, that I was not PhD material. I took my MS degree in the spring of 1978 with no clear idea what I would do next.
What carried me through were things Russian. Incurable romantic, I first fell in love with things Russian when I saw the movie Doctor Zhivago in the late 1960s. Then I read short stories in translation in high school and began learning about Russian history. How strange, I thought, that a country and a people could evolve to be so different from us in the mid-20th century USA. When I entered UVa in 1972 and was told I had to take a language, I chose Russian.
I regretted my choice a few times that first year. Russian was far harder than any of the physics or math courses I took, but after two years I realized I was starting to get somewhere. It took me two months to work through Turgenev's First Love (Первая любовь) on my own, but from there I kept going. I wanted to read Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov in the original. By the time I took my UVa degree in 1976, I had a double major: physics-astronomy and Russian language and literature. At Yale there was a young émigré actress who tried to put together a small amateur theater group. I was to play Bayan in Mayakovsky's The Bedbug (Клоп). We never did get that production to stage, but I still remember some of my lines. Олег Баян от счастья пьян. I also learned that as shy and scared as I was, there was at least one forum where I could lose my inhibitions.
At loose ends in the summer of 1978, I heard of an eccentric Russian language professor from Boston College who ran a small touring company called Pioneer Travel (www.pioneerrussia.com/about_pioneer.php) that ran summer driving and camping tours across the Soviet Union from the Baltic to the Black Sea. I got the last seat available on one of the four VW minivans that were to set out that summer, and I camped out in Boston's Logan Airport to get a $99 first come, first served ticket on PanAm to Amsterdam.
Part of our Merry Little Crew, 1978
From the Netherlands we made our way through Germany and Scandinavia, finally crossing into the Soviet Union from Finland. A few hours after crossing the border, I found myself walking the streets of Leningrad at this, the height of the White Nights. I felt I had landed on another planet. Everything, absolutely everything was so different from what I had grown up with. I remember clearly trying to explain to one of the first Russians I met what were the strange things, such as driver's license and a checkbook, that I was carrying with me. I remember how hard many of the people I met tried to explain to me their reality. It was the beginning of a love affair that has never died.
Transylvania by Train & Bike 2011
I have come to think of the transgender journey as one of transitioning cultures, traveling from one country to another. We grow up in one culture and are expected to abide by its rules and strictures, but if we prepare ourselves well enough for the journey, we can live in another culture and come to feel as comfortable in it as in the culture we were born into, perhaps even more so. It was walking the streets of Leningrad in the summer of 1978 that I first came to feel on my own skin that the reality I had been surrounded by since birth was not the only reality. I knew and could see with my own eyes that the Soviet system was deeply flawed, but I also saw that there was a positive side I had never known about, a side that was missing from my own society.
Transylvanian Country Roads
I will have cause to come back again and again to things Russian and the role they played in helping me find my way both then and later, but for now let me return to Transylvania.
We crossed the border from the Soviet Union into Romania on August 17. My friends in Romania may be particularly surprised to read my first impressions from my journal that day:
It was perhaps 6:00pm that we entered our first large Romanian town, Bacau. I must have forgotten what life was like outside the Soviet Union, for I was shocked at what I saw here. The main street was clean, wide, and modern. The buildings were new and stylish, unaffected by Soviet instant aging. Store windows were filled with consumer goods; the people were well dressed. Most surprising, there were no long Soviet lines.
Clock Tower in Saschiz
The next day we drove on to Sighisoara and wandered the ancient, non-touristed streets of the old town in the fading evening twilight. I felt I had gone back through the centuries. We camped that night under a full moon.
With Ancha, 2011
What would I have thought then if anyone told me I would return to Transylvania exactly 33 years later? More than this, at that time when I was doing my best to bury my transgender side, could I have imagined that on this return visit I would be betwixt and between, but more Robyn than my former self? It was a beautiful, tranquil weekend of riding my bicycle through the lush, rolling hills, enjoying long talks with the inn-keeper Ancha, and just being at peace. The moon was full. Another circle had closed.
Posted by Robyn Ann Jane Alice McCutcheon at 10:04 PM No comments: Links to this post
WahooWa! -- or -- So How Far Back Does This Go? (Part 3)
In Part 1 of "So How Far Back Does this Go?" I wrote:
Let me return to the diary I kept in college. I never did "find myself tearing out these two pages at some time in the future," but the entire volume I kept in 1975 is missing. That was the year in which I made my first abortive attempt to come out, dressing in public and corresponding with the gender clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. I know I wrote my heart out that year.
1972-76 for me were the years of "WahooWa!" -- the rallying cry of the University of Virginia. I traded New York City for sleepy Charlottesville, Virgina, the home of UVa, the "Princeton of the South," known also as The University or Mr. Jefferson's University. Thomas Jefferson's home Monticello is here, and it is said that Mr. Jefferson -- he always was and always will be Mr. Jefferson to students -- watched through a telescope as the university he designed was built in the valley below his home. In my mind I can almost see him at the eyepiece, studying at a distance to see if his architectural plans were being followed.
The Lawn at The University
For most Americans the college years are a chance to spread one's wings and start living a semi-independent life in a dormitory or apartment and learning what it means to open a bank account, cook one's own dinner, and in general find out just what is involved in living on one's own. It is a time of experimentation and wildness along with study and preparation for a future life.
I entered The University to fulfill my dream of becoming an astronomer. I chose a joint major in physics and astronomy. I took my first paying job as a night observer at the Leander McCormick Observatory with its historic 19th century, 26-inch Alvan Clark refracting telescope. I worked shifts that went from sunset to 10pm or from 2am to sunrise. During those shifts I had the observatory to myself as I loaded photographic plates and maneuvered the telescope to photograph star fields for the Astronomy Department's parallax program to determine star distances. Although Virginia is a southern state, it could get very cold in that unheated dome on winter nights. Sometimes I would welcome a bank of clouds that would give me an excuse to retreat to the heated office next door. There I would rummage through drawers and cabinets, a treasure trove of astronomical history. I was always on my own, and I was often dressed entirely in female clothing.
In Charlottesville I no longer had my sister's wardrobe to experiment with, but I had my own bank account and could buy what I wanted. I was too afraid to go into the women's departments at local stores, but I lived for the mail order catalogs from Sears and Montgomery Wards. I would save my money, place my order, and wait for the notice in the mailbox that I should come to the post office to pick up a parcel.
Leander McCormick Observatory
I was still young, shy, and scared. I dressed at home and at work and on the three mile walk to and from the observatory. On those walks I would choose the darkest path where I was pretty sure I wouldn't meet anyone. Terrified of encountering a professor or classmate who knew me, I would turn on my heels and walk the other way if I saw anyone coming in my direction. I did not understand that I could have passed easily with just a little work. Back then, contact was to be avoided. If there was a knock on the door of my apartment, I would pretend I was not home. No one was allowed into this secret world, a world that scared me to death even as I wished it could be my world in reality.
And as this was going on in my private life, I took the full math sequence through partial differential equations and physics through quantum mechanics. I fell in love with the Russian language. (That is a story for another installment.) I wasn't in the top tier of students by any means, but when I "took my degree" -- UVa-speak for graduation -- it was with high honors.
When the weather was nice, I loved to read the New York Times on Sunday afternoons in one of the formal gardens on the university grounds. A watershed event in my life took place one Sunday in 1975 when the New York Times Review of Books published a review of Conundrum by Jan Morris. I remember shaking from excitement. Just from the review I understood that I was not alone. Transsexualism was not just Christine Jorgensen, a character in a Gore Vidal novel, and a handful of rumors. Here was a respected British writer and journalist -- a person who had ascended Everest with Hillary in 1953 -- who was writing openly and honestly about her transition from James to Jan in mid-life.
At the Focal Plane of the 26-inch Refractor
When Conundrum made it to the University's Alderman Library, I read it cover to cover in a single sitting. I was enthralled and in tears. In the weeks to come I wrote and wrote in my diary as I got the nerve to read everything I could about transsexuality in the university's science and medical libraries. In the pre-Internet days, everything depended on the library, and UVa had good ones. I learned of a Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins and wrote there, receiving back an invitation to come in and talk.
But I never followed through. Even when I learned that sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) was being performed at the UVa medical center, I was too afraid to walk through the door. The only son of my father, a self-made man who had great expectations for his children, I could not overcome the fear of coming out. In my high school years I would write notes to my Dad, telling him things I was too fearful to tell him face to face. I would place the notes in his briefcase, only to retrieve them later for fear that they might actually be read. With that level of fear, how was I going to talk about THIS out loud? There were no support groups for gays that I knew of in Charlottesville, let along transgender, a word that hadn't even been coined yet. I would feel ashamed to knock on the door of a psychologist. Who would stand behind me? Who would hold my hand? Surely everyone would abandon me, declaring me insane? Maybe they would be right to think me so?
This, my first non-coming out, turned into my first purge. I had been accepted for graduate school at Yale, and in a matter of weeks my Mom, Dad, and sisters would be coming to Charlottesville for my graduation and to pack me up for the move north. I gathered together my small wardrobe, carefully wrapping everything into bundles, and walked a long distance to a deposit them in a dumpster from which I knew I would not be able to retrieve them.
Looking back today, I wish I could hug that young, scared person who was me in 1976. Little did she know how much she would have to go through, how many torments lay in store, how much she would hurt and how she would hurt those she loved. It's probably good she didn't know. It would have been too much to bear.
I went off to New Haven, Connecticut, fully purged and with a simplistic belief that I could just wish this away by paying it no mind and keeping my eyes on the task at hand. Being "cured" seemed so much easier and desirable than dealing with this.
But my interest in astronomy flagged as my romance for the night sky met the reality of a Ph.D. program. My overall interest in living fell to a low that I would try to hide with a smile. I could purge my wardrobe, but I could not purge my mind. It's then that I began to think of transsexuality as the white noise of my life. Like the 3-deg background radiation that permeates the Universe in all directions as an echo of the Big Bang, so this was everywhere. The best I could do was drown out the noise with other noise that comes with over-achievement and overwork. I didn't know then that I had begun a cycle, that just over a decade later I would feel a life and death necessity of talking to someone, to anyone who would listen and help ease the pain. When I finally did cross that line, the results were even more terrible than I had feared in 1976. . . .
But that is a story for another installment of "So How Far Back Does this Go?" Like most Americans, I look back with nostalgia at my college years, and I have a special place in my heart for Charlottesville, The University, and Leander McCormick Observatory. For the first time I timidly tried to be me, and for a brief moment I got close. My "WahooWa" was a timid, scared one, but I look back now and realize that as timid as it was, the voice was really, truly mine.
Interlude: Bucharest by Bicycle
Graffiti: Moldova is Romania
Many old friends and colleagues from my years on Hubble are probably wondering, "Is she still riding that bicycle, or has this T thing taken over her life with the speed of a overloaded tandem careening down a mountain road without brakes?" To all assembled lovers of two wheels I hereby declare, I'm still riding.
1989 Revolution Began Near Here
There's a deeply embedded T side to my riding a bicycle that almost no one would have guessed, but I will get to that in one of my "So How Far Back Does this Go?" entries. For the moment I just want to share the joy of riding in Bucharest, where this summer I have again become an urban cyclist as I once was for many years in the Washington, DC, area. I ride my bike to the Embassy in the morning. It's not even three miles from my home, but having the bicycle at work means I'm ready to go when the workday ends. I ride to my electrologist appointments, I ride to the market, and I ride just to explore Bucharest and the immediate countryside. Unlike in Tashkent, where I had an $800USD Honda with no gas gauge, I own no motorized transportation here, and thus the inspiration to ride is all the greater.
Ceausescu's People's Palace
Concert Hall
Mind you, this is urban cycling, not a pleasant ride in the park, although there are also some very beautiful parks. Bucharest is a very busy city with too many cars, not much infrastructure, and too many drivers in a hurry. As in the Soviet Union, cars were out of reach to all except the lucky and well-positioned during communist times. This all changed after the revolutions of the late 1980s. When Ceausescu fell in December 1989 and the doors of capitalism opened wide, the Romanian love affair with the automobile began and has not abated despite gridlock traffic and excellent, fast public transit. Everyone just has to own a car. It's a status symbol of wealth and well-being.
Chased by a Truck
Riding a bike in central Bucharest on a workday is about the same as riding in Manhattan or in downtown Washington, DC, during rush hour. There is a laughable system of bike lanes on sidewalks that is entirely unusable because of pedestrians and cars parked on the sidewalks. (I could mount my soapbox and lecture that bike lanes on sidewalks are dangerous by definition and should be banned everywhere, but I'll resist the temptation. . . .) That means I'm in the traffic lanes with the cars and trucks just as I used to be in the U.S. and as I still appear on the cover of the Maryland Bicycle Safety Guide. Since there are scarcely any hills in Bucharest, I'm able to keep up with the motorized traffic for extended spurts. In the very center sometimes it is impossible even for a bicycle to make headway in the gridlock, and then I find myself walking the bike on the sidewalk with the pedestrians.
Romania's Arc de Triomphe
As always, riding a bicycle is a great way to explore, and that's what I like most on weekends. I've been here long enough now that I don't mind getting lost and then figuring out how to get back on familiar ground. Some of the nicest districts are those I discover by accident. Bucharest was once known as the Paris of the East, and there are still back streets where one can find the atmosphere of the inter-war city that once was.
A Quieter Ride
Will I continue riding when the snows of winter come? Probably not. I did that for years in the U.S., but I will now let you in on a secret: it's not fun. There is nothing like a 35F (2C) rain to soak and chill a body to the bone. (The trick, as Peter O'Toole says in Lawrence of Arabia, was in not minding it.) Here I will enjoy the warm, long days of summer riding and switch to metro, bus, trolley, and tram for the bad winter days.
Astronomers' Street
Question for future thought: Should I trade in my trusty Atlantis for a Terry? My bicycling friends will smile and say, "So, she had to end on a T note after all, didn't she?"
CSC: The Only Limitations Are the Ones You Bring ...
Under Transylvanian Moons -- or -- So How Far Back...
WahooWa! -- or -- So How Far Back Does This Go? (P...
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Search for tag "Zaynul-Muqarrabin"
1818 May Birth of Mullá Zaynu'l-`Ábidín (Zaynu'l-Muqarrabín), Apostle of Bahá'u'lláh, in Najafábád. Najafabad; Iran Zaynul-Muqarrabin (Mulla Zaynul-Abidin); Apostles of Bahaullah; Births and deaths
1851 (In the year) Mullá Zaynu'l-'Abidín (Zaynu'l-Muqarrabin), a prominent mujtahid, became a Bábí, in Najafábád. Najafabad; Iran Zaynul-Muqarrabin (Mulla Zaynul-Abidin)
1890. 15–20 Apr E. G. Browne was granted four successive interviews with Bahá'u'lláh at Bahjí. [BBD43; BBR225; BKG371; GPB193]
See BBR225–32 for Browne's own account of the visit.
See BBR229–31, BKG371–3 and DH110 for Browne's pen portrait of Bahá'u'lláh.
'Abdu'l-Bahá gave Browne the manuscript of A Traveller's Narrative: the Episode of the Báb in the handwriting of Zaynu'l-Muqarrabín for him to translate. [EGB54, BW11p510]
BFA1:445; Balyuzi, Edward Granville Browne and The Bahá'í Faith and Momen, Selections From the Writings of E. G. Browne.
E.G. Browne was also in the presence of Bahá’u’lláh in the Junayn Garden (occurred some time during his five day visit to Bahjí from April 15th to April 20th in 1890). [Reflections on the Bahá'í Writings.] Akka Edward Granville Browne; Bahaullah, Life of; Bahaullah, Pen portraits of; Pen portraits; Portraits; Travelers Narrative (book); Zaynul-Muqarrabin (Mulla Zaynul-Abidin); Bahji; Junayn gardens
1903 (In the year) The passing of Mullá Zaynu'l-'Ábidín, surnamed Zaynu'l-Muqarrabín (the Ornament of the Near Ones) in 'Akká. He was born in Rajab, one of the villages of Najafábád near Isfahán to a family of Muslim clerics in May 1818. He had first heard of the Báb's claim while on pilgrimage in Karbilá in 1844 and became a believer in 1851. He met Bahá'u'lláh in Baghdád after His return from Kurdistán in 1856. He was among the believers who were exiled from Baghdád in July of 1868 and under his leadership and guidance the believers in Mosul became a model community. He was invited by Bahá'u'lláh to come to 'Akká in Sep-Oct 1885 and shortly after that Baha'u'lláh asked that the community in Mosul be abandoned. [EB274-276]
Jináb-i-Zaynu’l-Muqarrabín was well versed in Islamic jurisprudence. After the revelation of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, he was authorized to submit questions concerning the laws. The treatise, titled Questions and Answers, an appendix to the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, is a compilation he made of Bahá’u’lláh’s answers to questions concerning the laws of the Most Holy Book. It took more than two decades for "Questions and Answers" to be published in Persian and much longer to be published in English and other languages. [KA9]
See Some Answered Questions" and Its Compiler by Baharieh Rouhani Ma'ani published in Lights of Irfan, 18, pages 425-452. In this paper the author compares the similarities and differences of Questions and Answers and Some Answered Questions.
For an image Zaynu’l-Muqarrabín see Picture Gallery (miniature by Ethel Rosenberg). Rajab; Najafabad; Iran; Mosul; Iraq Zaynul-Muqarrabin (Mulla Zaynul-Abidin); Kitab-i-Aqdas (Most Holy Book); Laws; Questions and answers (Aqdas); Risalih-i-Sual va Javab (Questions and Answers); Ethel Rosenberg; In Memoriam; Births and deaths
1910 (In the year) The publication of Questions and Answers in the East. It was a document comprising exclusively of answers Bahá’u’lláh revealed in response to questions about the laws of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. Questions were submitted in writing and answers were likewise revealed in writing. It is by nature of small size regarded as an appendix to the Most Holy Book. Its compiler was Zaynu’l-Muqarrabín, one of the erudite, devoted and trusted followers of Bahá’u’lláh. He was a mujtahid (specialized in Islamic jurisprudence) before embracing the Bábí and Bahá’í Faiths. Bahá’u’lláh authorized him not only to ask questions about the laws of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, but also to compile Risálih-i-Su’ál va Javáb (Questions and Answers).
The text of Questions and Answers, though compiled during Bahá’u’lláh’s ministry, remained unpublished until 1910. Its English translation was published together with the authorized English translation of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas in 1992-3. The reason for the delay in the publication of Questions and Answers was the necessity for Bahá’u’lláh’s Book of Laws to be translated and annotated under the aegis of the Universal House of Justice. Without the Book, the appendix would have had no source of reference. [Lights of Irfán vol. 18 p430-432]
See Chronology 1993 Zaynul-Muqarrabin; Questions and Answers; Kitab-i-Aqdas (Most Holy Book) Bahaullah, Writings of
1993 Mar The English translation of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas was published. [BW92–3:44] [CBN vol 5 no 10 Mar93 pg1] [CoB310-13 UHJ Message 5Mar93] [VV142]
For the significance of its publication see BW92–3:45–6.
For its place in Bahá'í literature see BW92-3p45-6, p105-118.
This date also marks the first publication in the West of Questions and Answers, a document comprising exclusively of answers Bahá’u’lláh revealed in response to questions about the laws of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. See Chronology 1910. BWC Kitab-i-Aqdas (Most Holy Book); Translation; Publications; - Basic timeline, Condensed; - Basic timeline, Expanded; Questions and Answers; Zaynul-Muqarrabin; Z****
Picture Gallery of Early British Bahá'ís (1998). Published in honor of the UK Baha'i Centenary, 1998/99. [about]
Some Answered Questions" and Its Compiler, by Baharieh Rouhani Ma'ani, in Lights of Irfan, 18 (2017). Overview of the life of Laura Clifford Barney and her role in assembling and publishing the book Some Answered Questions, and a comparison with the appendix to the Kitab-i-Aqdas called Questions & Answers. [about]
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National Australia Bank former employee in court charged over falsifying home loan contracts
Photo: Andrew Matthews has been charged with 49 counts of obtaining property by deception. (ABC News: Danielle Bonica)
A former National Australia Bank employee has faced a Melbourne court charged with falsifying dozens of home loan contracts, allegedly resulting in him illegally pocketing more than $800,000.
Andrew Matthews fronted the Melbourne Magistrates Court for a brief hearing a week after NAB revealed it had sacked 20 bankers and disciplined another 32 over the sale of mortgages without accurate customer information and documentation.
The 36-year-old, who was named NAB's mobile banker of the year for regional Victoria in 2015, worked at the Seaford branch, in Melbourne's south-east, until he was sacked in July last year when the alleged scam was uncovered.
The ABC understands Mr Matthews is accused of getting dozens of customers to sign a document wrongly claiming they had been referred to NAB through the bank's Introducer Program, between 2012 and 2016.
The program rewards people who do not work for the bank for referring new customers.
Mr Matthews is accused of conspiring with another man to split the commissions.
He faces 49 counts of obtaining property by deception, one charge of attempting to obtain property by deception, one of conspiring to defraud and three counts of possessing proceeds of crime including a Ferrari and cash totalling $825,176.
In a statement, NAB said it identified the alleged scam through its internal checks and review processes and immediately reported Mr Matthews to police.
It said Mr Matthews was not one of the 20 bankers it last week announced had been sacked.
But it is understood those loans were also organised through the bank's own staff and its Introducer Program.
Mr Matthews is on bail and will return to the Melbourne Magistrates' Court in February for a committal mention.
This article was first published by http://www.abc.net.au/news
Author: Emma Younger
Last modified onWednesday, 02 May 2018 03:05
More in this category: « CBA to refund $16m to 140,000 customers, scraps insurance products We've had 'significant failures,' ANZ Bank tells royal commission »
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21. Sleep and cognitive preservation
Home » 21. Sleep and cognitive preservation
Mary Morrell.
Sleep disruption and cognitive impairment
A growing body of evidence suggests that sleep disruption, especially associated with Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA), produces a consistent pattern of deficits in cognition, particularly in relation to attention, episodic memory, and executive function. However, explanations vary regarding how sleep disruption affects cognition, and reliable evidence is hard to find. This issue may relate to the many, common comorbid conditions that are present in patients with sleep disruption, especially older people, such as OSA. This presentation will review the evidence for cognitive impairment in sleep disruption, using OSA as a model, and focusing on the methodological and theoretical challenges of exploring the effect of sleep on cognition. To conclude, the presentation will review future directions for the field including suggestions of core design elements for future studies.
Where do we go from here? The number and type of studies exploring the extent to which sleep impacts on cognitive function is growing exponentially. Given the increasing prevalence of road traffic and work-place accidents, the large number of shift-workers, and the links between sleep disruption and cognitive dysfunction in older people, this focus is warranted. However, little is known about who is most at risk of cognitive impairment, and subsequent dementia. Defining who, why and how future studies can provide treatments to the most vulnerable individuals are important targets. It is hoped that the B-DEBATE will enable the field to focus on these questions and support the development of future researchSleep disruption and cognitive impairment.
As a student, Professor Morrell developed an interest in the control of breathing during sleep which continues to drive her research at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London.
Professor Morrell’s research focuses on the causes and consequences of sleep disordered breathing; particularly the impact of intermittent hypoxia on the brain. Her aim is to translate physiological research into improvements in patient care. Recently, she developed a UK respiratory-sleep network facilitating multi-center trials. The network has previously completed a trial to determine the impact of treating OSA in older people, and is currently investigating mild OSA. Mary has served on the American Thoracic Society Board of Directors, the Physiological Society Executive Board and she is a Past-President of the British Sleep Society.
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Listings for Sky Movies Drama on Monday, July 15 2019
04:15 Taps Film Army cadets Tom Cruise and Sean Penn go to extreme lengths to protect their academy when it is threatened by local developers. Gripping drama. Contains offensive language. (1981)(121 mins) Also in HD
06:25 The Butterfly Tree Film Father and son Al and Fin find themselves entranced by a mysterious florist as they attempt to deal with the death of Fin's mother. Drama with Wildlife's Ed Oxenbould. (2017)(93 mins) Also in HD
08:10 All The Right Moves Film Young football player Tom Cruise hopes a college scholarship will help him escape small-town life, but clashes with his coach threaten to derail his dreams. Sports drama. (1983)(87 mins) Also in HD
09:50 Babel Film The accidental shooting of tourist Cate Blanchett in Morocco has a world-wide ripple effect. Drama with Brad Pitt. Contains strong language, sex and flashing images. (2006)(137 mins) Also in HD
12:20 Tristan + Isolde Film A chance meeting between English knight James Franco and Irish princess Sophia Myles leads to a passionate yet perilous affair. With Rufus Sewell. Violent scenes. (2006)(121 mins) Also in HD
14:30 I Can Only Imagine Film The inspiring story of singer Bart Millard, who escaped an abusive childhood and went on to write the biggest selling Christian pop song of all time. With Dennis Quaid. (2018)(105 mins) Also in HD
16:25 The 2019 Top Ten Show Film Which movies are doing the best business at home and across the pond? Clips from the UK and US Top Ten show you the best of what's on offer on the big screen. Also in HD
16:40 Anything Film After attempting to take his own life, small-town widower John Carroll Lynch moves to Los Angeles where he begins to bond with his eccentric Hollywood neighbours. Drama. (2017)(90 mins) Also in HD
18:20 The 15:17 To Paris Film True-life drama focusing on the lives of three US backpackers who thwarted a terrorist attack on a high-speed train. Clint Eastwood directs. (2018)(90 mins) Also in HD
20:00 Say Anything... Film Classic teen romance from Jerry Maguire director Cameron Crowe. A beautiful and brilliant high school student finds herself pursued by charming underachiever John Cusack. (1989)(96 mins) Also in HD
21:45 The Leisure Seeker Film Warm comedy-drama starring Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren as a long-married couple who embark on a golden-years road trip in their family's old camper-van. (2017)(109 mins) Also in HD
23:45 My Cousin Rachel (2017) Film Young heir Sam Claflin vows revenge against his late cousin's wife, but soon finds himself falling under her spell. Dark romance with Rachel Weisz. (2017)(102 mins) Also in HD
01:40 An Officer And A Gentleman Film Classic romantic drama starring Richard Gere as a troubled trainee naval officer who falls for Debra Winger's sassy factory girl. Strong language/moderate sex and nudity. (1982)(122 mins) Also in HD
03:50 To Sir With Love Film New teacher Sidney Poitier tries to inspire the students of a rough east London school using his own unorthodox methods. Touching drama co-starring Lulu. (1967)(100 mins) Also in HD
06:00 The Forgiven (2017) Film Roland Joffe's drama stars Forest Whitaker as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, summoned to a maximum-security prison by a notorious murderer seeking clemency. With Eric Bana. (2017)(115 mins) Also in HD
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Libyan plane hijacked, lands in Malta
A man who said he was armed with a grenade hijacked a Libyan plane which landed on Malta Friday with 118 people on board, Malta's prime minister and government sources on the Mediterranean island said.
After more than an hour on the tarmac, the plane's door opened and a first group of women and children were seen descending a mobile staircase.
"First group of passengers, consisting of women and children, being released now," Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said on Twitter, adding in a later tweet that 50 passengers in all were being let off the plane.
The Airbus A320 had been on a domestic Libyan route operated by Afriqiyah Airways from Sabha in southern Libya to the capital Tripoli but was re-routed.
"The Afriqiyah flight from Sabha to Tripoli has been diverted and has landed in Malta. Security services coordinating operations," Muscat said on his official Twitter account.
"It has been established that Afriqiyah flight has 111 passengers on board: 82 males, 28 females, 1 infant," he said. There are also seven crew members.
Muscat later spoke to Libya's prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj, the head of the north African country's fledgling unity government.
The plane could be seen on the tarmac surrounded by military vehicles and all flights in and out of the airport were initially either delayed or diverted to destinations in Italy.
- 'Negotiations under way' -
There were conflicting reports about the number of hijackers.
Maltese government sources told AFP that there was a single hijacker on board who had told the crew that he had a grenade and would release the passengers only if his as yet unspecified demands were met.
A source from Libya's unity government spoke of "hijackers" on board.
"Negotiations are under way to guarantee the security of all the passengers," the source said, without specifying who was negotiating.
An Afriqiyah Airways source said two hijackers had threatened the pilots with an explosive device, probably a grenade.
Malta International Airport tweeted that there had been "an unlawful interference" but that operations had now resumed.
Flights from Brussels, London and Paris had been due to land at the airport on Friday and were delayed.
The flight from Paris has since been able to land, according to the airport's online arrivals board.
All outgoing flights were shown as delayed.
Libya has been in a state of chaos since the 2011 overthrow of Moamer Kadhafi left warring militias battling for control of different parts of the country.
Forces loyal to a fledgling national unity government recently took control of the coastal city of Sirte, which had been a bastion for the Islamic State group since June 2015.
Western powers have pinned their hopes of containing jihadism in the energy-rich North African state on the government but it has failed to establish its authority over all of the country.
A rival authority rules the country's far east, backed by the forces under military strongman Marshal Khalifa Haftar who have been battling jihadists in second city Benghazi.
Only local airlines -- banned from European airspace -- operate in Libya, with flights to Tunis, Cairo, Amman, Istanbul and Khartoum.
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SET ON THE RIGHT PATH
Legal expert explains why Ukraine is emerging as a ‘hidden gem’ for international port investors
Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Ukraine slumped to $2.2bn in 2017, falling from the $10.7bn peak of 2008. The post-Euromaidan deterioration of the investment climate, political instability and the significant devaluation of the local currency are only partly to blame. A focus on a commodity-based economy is not particularly attractive to foreign investors and corruption in courts and law enforcement agencies are not incentivising businesses to take risks.
Despite the Ukrainian leadership’s appeals to invest in the country, Ukraine remains a difficult place to do business. Investors still face issues such as regulatory risk relating to land ownership and capital flows, problems with registration and ownership of property, complicated tax administering, lack of trust in the judiciary, oppressive enforcement agencies and unlawful actions by the Prosecutor General’s Office, the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) and police. Corruption continues to hold back Ukraine’s rapid economic recovery and impede its healthy development.
FDI, without doubt, is the key to Ukraine’s sustainable and healthy economic development and should be the basis for decisive economic growth. The attraction of FDI should be one of the highest priorities for the Government and its agencies. But if perceived corruption continues, then all attraction efforts will be in vain.
During the last few years, Ukraine’s leadership has established a few important institutions, such as the police, the Supreme Court, and new anti-corruption agencies, but the reform process has been mixed. In a European Business Association survey, 57% of those surveyed were ‘dissatisfied’ with the investment climate in 2017; that number has now decreased by 20%, but 38% of investors are still unhappy with the business climate. The biggest reason given for dissatisfaction was the high level of corruption, second only to a lack of trust in the judicial system and the lack of land reform.
Port problems
According to the Ukrainian State Property Fund, 70% of Ukraine’s port infrastructure is outdated. The dire need for modernisation in ports coupled with the growing demand for port grain handling facilities to cope with increasing exports have turned considerable attention to infrastructure projects. The Government’s ministry of infrastructure, with the support of international finance institutions, has launched several infrastructure projects including dredging works in Chornomorsk and Yuzhny ports, concession projects in Kherson and Olvia ports, and realisation of the Via Carpatia and Gо Highway.
Even with this challenging business climate, Ukraine’s ports sector is attracting investment and will continue to do so as long as the authorities in charge implement and maintain critical changes, such as introducing support teams to government ministries. These teams – such as Spilno Office, Reform Support Team of the Ministry of Infrastructure, and the National Investment Council – are not only critical for the delivery of the much-needed reform priorities, but they are also the talent that will spearhead a business climate change.
The Ukrainian government has also taken a number of practical actions on a legislative level. A new draft law on concessions and a legal framework for inland waterways is in Parliament and expected to be voted on and approved this year.
Already, there are encouraging signs in the Ukrainian port sector: P&O Maritime started operations in Ukraine in January and other world-leading port operators such as DP World and Hutchison Ports are eyeing port assets in Yuzhny and Chornomorsk.
Local, private port operators are not lagging behind either. Private port operator TIS is launching a modern grain terminal jointly with the global trader Cargill, while another grain terminal is under construction in the port of Mariupol.
Ukraine is thus emerging as a hidden gem for international investors targeting high returns in a strategically important location next to major European markets. While the risk posed by corruption and complex legislation should not be underestimated, these challenges can be overcome.
Government support complemented by a favourable attitude from funding institutions is invaluable, but this must be paired with comprehensive and dedicated guidance from international and local business consultants to unlock the value and prise the pearl from the shell on the Black Sea coast.
Rachid Bouda is a port expert for Odessa-Ukraine at Ukraine-based law firm Interlegal.
Source: http://www.portstrategy.com/news101/world/europe/set-on-the-right-path
Posted by Rachid Bouda Без рубрики
« Seaways. — 2018. — July
Yap Yin Soon: “Subject to review” clauses – Is there an intention to be immediately bound? »
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Baseball Notches 14-5 MASCAC Tournament Win over Salem State
Bridgewater St. (17-20) 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 3 6 14 16 3
Salem St. (18-20) 0 0 2 1 1 0 0 1 0 5 12 5
2B: Liam Bell; Gavin Sparkman; Colin Josselyn; David Skiendiel
2B: Kyle O'Connor; Mike Griffin
WESTFIELD, Mass. -- David Skiendiel went 4-5 and drove in three run as fifth-seeded Bridgewater State University posted a 14-5 come-from-behind victory over #4 Salem State University in the opening round of the 2019 Massachusetts State Collegiate Athletic Conference (MASCAC) Baseball Tournament on Wednesday afternoon at Bud and Jim Hagan Field in Westfield.
The win marked the Bears' first MASCAC Tounrament victory in seven years.
With the win, Bridgewater State (17-20) advances to the double-elimination portion of the tournament and will face top seed and tournament host Westfield State University at 3:00 p.m. today. The Vikings (19-19) are eliminated from the tournament with today's loss.
The Vikings jumped out to a 2-0 lead on a two-run single by Madoc Fischer in the bottom of the third inning. A sacrifice fly off the bat of Traverse Briana in the fourth and another by Brendan Greene in the fifth extended the lead to 4-0.
The Bears rallied to tie it at 4-4 in the top of the sixth as they scored four runs off five hits. The inning was highlighted by an RBI single by Dominic Precopio and a pair of RBI doubles by Gavin Sparkman and Skiendiel.
Two Salem fielding errors and a sacrifice fly by Precopio put the Bears out in front, 5-4, in the top of the seventh.
Bridgewater sent nine men to the plate and pushed across three runs to take an 8-4 lead in the top of the eighth. Skiendiel and Lewis Robinson rapped RBI base hits in the frame while the third run scored on a wild pitch.
The Viking cut the deficit to 8-5 in the home half of the eighth on a RBI single by Rebello. David Kearns came on with the tying run at the plate in the frame and got a big strikeout to end the inning and maintain the lead for the Bears.
The Bears put the game out of reach with a six-run, ninth inning. The inning featured three hits, including an RBI single by Skiendiel and a two-run double by Liam Bell, as well as a pair of walks and two key Salem errors.
Alex McGrath picked up the win in relief for Bridgewater. McGrath (2-1) allowed a run on three hits over 2 2/3 innings with two walks and four strikeouts. Kerns earned his team-leading fourth save of the season.
Jarrett Archambault worked the first five innings for the Bears and gave up four runs (three earned) on nine hits with three walks and a pair of strikeouts.
Bell (2-for-6, 2R, 2RBI), Precopio (2-for-4, BB, R, RBI), Robinson (2-for-6, R, RBI), Sparkman (2-for-6, 2R, RBI) and Kevin Bresciani (2-for-4, 2BB, 2R) each had a pair of hits for the Bears. Colin Josselyn reached safely in four out of his five plate appearances as he walked four times and doubled.
Brock Riley took the loss for Salem in relief of starter Andrew McLaughlin. Riley (4-6) gave up four runs (three earned) on four hits with two walks and a strikeout. McLaughlin pitched into the sixth as he allowed four runs on nine hits in 5 1/3 innings with a walk and a strikeout. Shawn Rebello and Fisher each had two hits for the Vikings.
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Russia 16. Juli 2019
HDI 0.795 Population 144.6 m
Unemployment rate 7.1%3) Women in Parliament 8%
UN Education Index 0.93 Poverty n/a 2)
Gini-Index 31.0 (2002)
Source: UNDP: Human Development Report 2005. Figures for 2003 - if not indicated otherwise. 1) Annual growth between 1975 and 2003. 2) Population living below $ 1 (1990-2003). 3) Unemployment rate according to ILO data.
Russia’s political and economic development has been greatly influenced by the policies of Vladimir Putin, who was elected president at the beginning of 2000. When he took office, the parameters for the development of a market-based democracy were in place, albeit incomplete and not enforced. A tradition of the rule of law, civil society and democracy was lacking, which also hampered progress in the establishment of a market-based democracy.
In democratic transformation, no substantive progress was achieved during the period examined. President Putin consolidated his power in 2000 through measures that do not reflect democratic standards. The list includes marginalizing political actors outside the federal executive, asserting control over nationwide mass media, harassing politically relevant NGOs and violating human rights in the fight against Chechen rebels in the Northern Caucasus. These practices persist today.
This is due to the fact that the political leadership obviously does not consider a qualitative enhancement of democratic transformation one of its key tasks. Nevertheless, President Putin has stabilized the political system. Fair elections are largely guaranteed, albeit with heavily manipulated campaigns in favor of pro-presidential forces.
Transformation toward a market economy progressed in Putin’s first term (2000-2004).. Reforms of the tax code and land ownership laws have been achieved. However, implementation has been rather inefficient due to growing bureaucracy, corruption and political interference. The social security system remains poorly financed and insufficient. Despite these shortcomings, Russia is experiencing an economic boom.
At the end of Yeltsin’s presidency (1998-99), political actors moved to consolidate power for the short term. Once Putin took office, a long-term development strategy was quickly drawn up and has been transferred smoothly into legislation. More recently, and especially in 2004, liberal market reformers appear to have lost influence in the Kremlin. Internal conflict connected to this shift has hampered economic reforms.
It should be stressed that Russia’s political leaders are concerned primarily with stabilizing the political system and generating significant economic growth. The violation of fundamental democratic rights and market principles appear to be acceptable byproducts of this policy. Moscow considers its record thus far successful. However, when measured by the normative standards of a market-based democracy, there remain considerable deficits in both political and market economy development.
Russia’s economic and political transformation process began in the second half of the 1980s with the reforms of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. But the defining influences for post-Soviet Russia were the reforms of Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
One of the first milestones in democratic transformation was the Russian presidential election in June 1991, which Yeltsin won. Afterwards, conflict arose between the reform-oriented Yeltsin and the rather conservative parliament. In the fall of 1993, Yeltsin ended the political stalemate with the violent, unconstitutional dissolution of parliament. In addition, a commission close to the president drafted a constitution calling for a federal presidential republic. The constitution was approved by a referendum of the Russian people in December 1993. Parliamentary elections were held at the same time as the referendum. Outspokenly antidemocratic parties won 43% of the vote. During the next six years, there was no significant change in this balance of power. Considerable resistance to democratic trends was observed at the regional level, where a variety of political constellations developed. Some exhibited authoritarian traits often exceeded the broad authority granted to them by the constitution.
While the Russian constitution expressly provides for a democratic rule of law, the reality under President Yeltsin was characterized by significant democratic deficiencies. This resulted not only from anti-democratic forces that blocked reform projects in Parliament and ignored democratic requirements at the regional level, but also from executive policies of the Yeltsin administration characterized by political manipulation and pressure on the mass media. This environment allowed non-democratic actors such as the so-called oligarchs to gain considerable influence in political decision marking.
The first milestone in Russia’s transformation toward a market economy was the 1992 reform package. Its core components were the liberalization of prices and mass privatization. However, instead of the anticipated upswing, Russia found itself facing a prolonged economic crisis. GDP declined by more than 60% by 1998. Russia was competitive on the world market only as an exporter of raw materials. Imported goods dominated many sectors of the domestic market. Capital spending shrank dramatically while capital flight remained high. Core economic reforms, such as a new tax code and land ownership laws,, languished in the legislative process. The protracted economic crisis also adversely affected the population’s standard of living. Social inequality increased considerably. Economic problems culminated in a dramatic financial crisis in August 1998.
Yeltsin never enjoyed the approval of more than 10% of the population after 1996. In a move to groom his successor, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as prime minister in 1999. The new Yedinstvo party, with close ties to Putin, achieved unexpected success in the December 1999 parliament elections to the State Duma, placing a close second to the Communists. Yeltsin resigned at the end of the year, and Prime Minister Putin took over as acting President as prescribed by the constitution. In the March 2000 presidential elections, Putin won an absolute majority n the first round. He was re-elected in March 2004 with an even stronger mandate.
More than half of the Russian population approves of Putin’s leadership. He is seen as a decisive actor. His military campaign against separatists in the Northern Caucasus and his tough stance on business oligarchs has won him support. The political reforms of 2004 increased central control over regional governments raised constitutionality questions. Extensive violations of human rights in the Chechen war and new constraints on press freedom and NGOs were also part of Putin’s policies.
Russia’s stateness is seriously questioned only in the northern Caucasus. Since the beginning of the second Chechen war in September 1999, the Russian army has been unable to achieve full control of the region. Rebels regularly attack representatives of Russia’s central power throughout the region, and have committed several terrorist acts in the region of the northern Caucasus and in the Russian capital. Apart from the northern Caucasus case, there are no serious limitations on the state’s monopoly on the use of force.
All citizens have the same civil rights. However, there are many cases of discrimination by representatives of state agencies against Russian citizens belonging to ethnic minorities from the north Caucasus region.
There is separation of church and state. However, the Russian Orthodox Church holds a privileged status and other religious groups, including the Catholic Church, have occasionally complained about discrimination. The political process is secularized.
Apart from Chechnya, the state has established basic infrastructure throughout the country, including administrative institutions, fundamental administration of justice, and implementation of political decisions. However, bureaucratization, corruption, and a lack of funds have caused performance to be uneven.
Outside Chechnya, there are no serious restrictions on the voting process. However, election campaigns are heavily manipulated in favor of pro-presidential forces.
In the formal political decision-making process, elected representatives have full power to govern. The power of the elected president to govern is undisputed, as well as the parliament’s decision-making competencies, as outlined in the constitution. However, the actual imbalance between the elected representatives in favor of the President weakens parliamentary control. Especially in the second half of the 1990s, so-called oligarchs, who lacked any democratic legitimization, were seen as powerful forces behind the president. As Putin’s reaction to political interference by oligarchs has shown on already three occasions (the Gusinsky-Affair, the Berezovsky-Affair and the Yukos-Affair), he is not willing to accept this interference. It can now be observed that members and former members of the secret service are gaining influence under Putin. As they receive formal positions within the state executive branch, their participation in the formal political decision-making process is legitimate and in line with the democratic institutions, though their intention may be – and on some occasions definitely is – anti-democratic.
However, considerable restrictions on rights to organize and communicate politically exist. The national government largely accepts freedom of association and freedom of assembly, but there have been substantial violations of these rights in some regions. As the demonstration against social welfare reforms in January 2005 indicated, even spontaneous demonstrations against the government, which violate the registration rules, are tolerated in many regions. However, flexibly arranged construction sites and considerations about security concerns are commonly used to prohibit demonstration. The effects of a number of demonstrations have been minimized by state-organized "counter-demonstrations."
NGOs critical of the national or regional government have on many occasions been subject to harassment by state agencies. This harassment is not the result of insufficient legislation, but of informal pressure. It takes the form of extensive controls by state inspectors (tax, fire, etc.), which often use their power to hamper the work of NGOs with the use of extensive visits, confiscation of documents and sanctions or fines. On several occasions, NGOs claimed that burglaries in their offices had been committed by state representatives with the primary aim of destruction or theft of work-related documents. The mass media are subject to influence from the executive branch. During Putin’s first term, private media with nation-wide reach have systematically been brought under (at least indirect) state control. Media coverage of elections is systematically manipulated. There are extensive restrictions on freedom of the press in covering the war in Chechnya.
Serious deficiencies exist in the checks and balances among the executive, legislative and judiciary branches, even though the powers are institutionally differentiated. As the president has a stable majority in parliament, the legislature exercises its review functions only to a very limited degree. The upper chamber of Parliament will be additionally weakened through the appointment of governors by the president, as half of the chamber consists of representatives of the governors. There are serious indications that the executive branch influences decisions by the judiciary on a regular basis.
The judiciary is fundamentally independent, but lower-court decisions in particular are often influenced by corruption and political pressure. In specific high-profile cases like the Yukos affair, principles of equal treatment and formal court proceedings have been violated in the interest of the national government.
Political and bureaucratic corruption is perceived as high in Russia. Corrupt officeholders with political connections often elude adequate prosecution.
Civil liberties are affected to some degree by the lack of legal constraints on government action, and by the bureaucracy’s sometimes selective application of the laws. Since the beginning of the second Chechen war in September 1999, all parties to the conflict have continuously engaged in massive violations of human rights there. Arbitrary arrests and abductions, torture, rape, extortion and looting by Russian security forces are hardly ever prosecuted. So far, there has only been one high-profile case where a Russian officer has been sentenced for abductions of Chechen civilians.
Apart from the limitations on the rule of law described above, democratic institutions are stable. However, the bureaucracy’s implementation of legislated provisions often remains a serious problem. Most relevant actors view institutions of the democratic state as legitimate.
There is no serious opposition to the political system as it is being reshaped by President Putin. However, specific democratic institutions have on several occasions been ignored when they were perceived as hampering the realization of concrete political goals. In summary, the acceptance of democratic institutions is for most actors more a pragmatic consideration than one of principle.
So far, Russia has been unable to establish an organizationally stable, socially rooted party system. The relevant political parties are predominantly personality-oriented voting associations. The Communist Party is the only party with an organized mass base—a state of affairs that is probably not helpful to democratic consolidation. The party with the biggest faction in parliament, United Russia, was founded in 2001 by a merger of the two main rivaling parties of the prior elections, which both of which had been founded only in 1999. Of the nine factions formed in the Parliament elected in 1999, only three are represented in the Parliament elected in 2003. As a result of weak political parties and of the election victory of pro-presidential United Russia, Parliament has ceased to function as an efficient check on the executive power. In the Parliament elected in 2003 the political opposition has been permanently marginalized. Accordingly, political reforms meant to strengthen the party system – mainly by favoring bigger parties – are unlikely to have an impact in the short run.
The range of interest groups in the political sphere is limited. Important social interests are underrepresented. The political leadership’s reaction to the interest groups’ work has essentially been no more than symbolic. Putin has stressed the need for a strong civil society in several well-publicized speeches, but at the same time he has blamed Russian NGOs for accepting support from foreign donors. NGOs critical toward the government have been excluded from the dialogue between state executive and civil society and they have on several occasions been harassed by state agencies. The successor to the socialist labor union, which traditionally cooperated closely with the state and the management, has retained dominance. As a result, labor unions seldom adopt a critical stance toward government policies. Moreover, they lack financial and organizational potential to act independently. Organizations representing business interests had to be created from scratch after the end of the Soviet Union. As the biggest entrepreneurs, the oligarchs, represented their interests individually, the main business organization, the Russian Union of Entrepreneurs and Industrialists, remains weak. Its critical stance on the Yukos affair has recently confirmed that it can be sidelined by the state.
The population’s approval of democracy per se as voiced in representative polls is moderate to high depending on the wording of the question. In an opinion poll, conducted by the Moscow-based Institute of Interdisciplinary Social Studies (IKSI) in summer 2004, 40% of the respondents gave a positive evaluation of the term “democracy” and 25% a negative one, with the remaining 35% opting for a neutral evaluation. Moreover, when asked about specific democratic principles, including democratic elections, accountability and civil rights, the majority of the Russian population does not consider any of these principles to be important, as polls by institutes like the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), the Russian Public Opinion & Market Research Group (ROMIR) or the Levada-Center regularly indicate. When asked which rights and freedoms they personally considered to be important, only 6% of the respondents opted for freedom of expression, 5% for religious freedom, 3% for the right to elect representatives to the state organs of power, 2% for press freedom, 1% for freedom of assembly. In the same opinion poll, social and economic rights, like the right to medical care and the right to housing or work, all gained the consent of more than a third of the respondents (FOM polls in summer 2004). In summary about a quarter of the population is openly opposed to democracy, whereas not much more than 10% can be counted as strong democrats. Accordingly, the huge majority of the Russian population has no strong opinion on democracy. This implies a sort of silent consent to democratic norms, but no principal opposition to undemocratic norms.
Self-organization in civil society encounters strong barriers, namely a burden of the Soviet past, where NGOs did not exist, and harassment by the state executive. Typically, it takes the form of legal controls by state inspections for tax and fire, etc., which often use their powers to hamper the work of NGOs. NGOs are unevenly distributed, flourishing mainly in the mega-cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and are often spontaneous and temporary. Many Russian NGOs have been brought into existence only by the engagement of international organizations and sponsors. According to the World Value Survey from 1999, two-thirds of the Russian population does not belong to any voluntary organization. General trust is also relatively low developed with only 35% of the population agreeing that people in general can be trusted.
The key indicators show a relatively high level of socioeconomic development for Russia. Measured in terms of HDI, the country’s level of development permits adequate freedom of choice for almost all citizens. There is no indication of fundamental social exclusion on the basis of poverty, education or gender discrimination. The economic boom, which started in 1999 and led to a rise in GDP of about one-third until 2004, has been accompanied by a doubling of average wages. An important contribution to the income of the rural population comes from household plots used for agricultural production. Most of their output does not reach the market because it is consumed domestically. The dimension of this subsistence economy is hard to estimate. According to Russian statistics, its share in Russian agricultural production is up to 40%.
However, at the same time social inequality as indicated by the Gini coefficient has increased markedly. Reasons for this are among others long-term unemployment, an insufficient pension system and a flat income tax rate. There are considerable regional differences in levels of socioeconomic development within Russia. Financial readjustments among regions do not materially reduce these discrepancies. As many Russians have additional unofficial income and as definitions of the poverty line differ, there are various estimates of the amount of Russians living in poverty. According to official Russian data, 24% of the population was living in poverty in 2002. The World Bank, using its own calculation, quoted 20%. In both cases, there is a marked decline over recent years. For 1999, the official Russian figure was 42% and the World Bank figure 28%.
The foundations of market economy-based competition are assured by the institutional framework. Prices on the domestic market were decontrolled in 1992. By now, price regulation by the state is restricted to utilities. The state also subsidizes prices for agricultural products. The national currency is not freely convertible and there are restrictions on cash exports. However, they do not form a serious problem for the transfer of profits. Foreign trade has been liberalized and at present, remaining restrictions are not more extensive than in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Russia expects to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) soon; agreement on WTO entry with the European Union was reached in spring 2004. However, state economic policy remains skewed in favor of politically influential large corporations. The Yukos affair demonstrated that competitive companies can be eliminated by bureaucratic means for reasons not related to economic policy.
Additionally, broad sectors of the economy defined as significant to national security are shielded from competitive pressure. The “natural” monopolies in the natural gas, electricity and transportation industries have not yet been reformed despite year-long debates. However, for the liberalized part of the economy the anti-monopoly agency functions rather efficiently with exceptions on the regional level, where some administrations have blocked competition. The informal sector amounted to 30% to 50% of GDP in the late 1990s. According to the Russian government its size has been reduced considerably with the economic reforms under President Putin. However, empirical studies are not yet available.
Foreign trade has been liberalized in principle, but substantial regulatory exceptions remain, such as imports of agro-food products or cars and on exports of some metals. Russian tariffs have presented stumbling blocks in negotiations to join the WTO.
Though the liquidity of the Russian banking sector has improved remarkably since the financial crisis of 1998, it remains severely underdeveloped and is still not able to perform its economic function as a financial intermediary. Russian banks are not yet able to compete internationally. In the wake of Russia’s WTO negotiations, they have been assured that they will get protection from foreign competition. At the same time, differentiation of the Russian banking sector is increasing and seems to be functioning. State regulation of the banking has some deficits, but by and large seems to be adequate. Banks have been forced to adopt international standards, though at a lower pace then originally planned. However, there is a lack of supervision. The Central Bank is rather inefficient and according to World Bank surveys of Russian entrepreneurs in 1999 and 2002, considered to be highly corrupt.
After the 1998 financial crisis, which caused significant inflationary pressure as the ruble lost around 70% of its value against the U.S. dollar, the government and the independent central bank were able to bring inflation under control and stabilize the exchange rate through a consistent budgetary and monetary policy.
Since Putin took office in 2000, the country has adhered to a austerity policy that regularly leads to budget surpluses. These made a significant reduction of foreign debt possible. The fact that monetary policy is integrated into a general economic policy concept is also indicated by the stability fund, which was introduced to save the state budget’s windfall profits from high oil prices for the future. This fund has successfully been defended against demands for increased state subsidies.
There are formal property rights and the regulation of the acquisition of property is defined formally in law. With the exception of the sale of farmland, the legal provisions are practical. However, they are not consistently implemented or adequately safeguarded by law, especially against state intervention. For example, high level state officials have repeatedly cast doubt on the validity of the privatization auctions conducted in the 1990s. In another example, in 2004 the oil company Yukos was deprived of its right to trade Sibneft shares that it had acquired legally. Critical observers described the Yukos affair as re-nationalization. Some property rights, especially copyrights, minority shareholders’ rights, and creditors’ rights in bankruptcy proceedings are ignored on a regular basis.
Private enterprise is the backbone of the economy, but state enterprises continue to exist alongside private businesses, as do market concentrations tolerated by the state, especially in the “natural” monopolies such as natural gas, electricity and railroads.
Parts of the social security system, especially health care, are well developed in Russia, but they do not cover all risks for all strata of the population. There is almost no state support for the unemployed. Though they have been increased considerably in recent years, pensions are still insufficient to survive on. Without additional income, such as a job in the shadow economy, private farming or family support, these social groups are at risk of slipping into poverty. The big cities have large numbers of homeless people whom state social facilities completely fail to reach.
The state-organized health care system suffers from a lack of funds, especially in rural areas, leading to significant shortages of care delivery. Economic improvement since 1999 has mitigated the country’s social problems, but with only limited improvement so far in the state’s social insurance systems. Under President Putin the reform of the state’s social welfare system has aimed at liberalization. However, most Russians lack the financial means for private insurance and especially in the pension system private companies are underdeveloped.
Equality of opportunity is not fully assured. There are substantial differences from one region to another. Members of non-Russian ethnic groups, especially those from the Caucasus, suffer systematic discrimination in the educational system and on the job market. Social exclusion extends to people living in the Northern Caucasus, where in some regions living standards are far below the Russian average and a quarter of the population is unemployed and wages are fare below the national average. There are considerable communities of homeless individuals in large Russian cities. In the whole of Russia, women have equal access to education but are underrepresented in the political system and in business management.
After the dramatic deterioration in macroeconomic fundamentals caused by the 1998 financial crisis, an improved economic environment - characterized by an undervalued ruble, rising prices for Russian exports of raw materials in the world market, and low real wages - laid the foundations for significant economic improvement. Since Putin took office in 2000, the state’s economic policy has attempted to maintain this upswing with comprehensive economic reforms. During the period from 1999 to 2004, Russia’s economy has grown on average by 7% a year. At the same time, all key macroeconomic indicators have improved considerably, apart from the unemployment rate which remains close to 10%. Inflation has been brought down to 10%. Due to high world market prices for Russian raw material exports, the foreign trade balance is positive and the state budget runs a surplus. Russia has used this surplus to reduce its sovereign debts.
Russian economic policy is focused on medium-term economic growth. President Putin has set ambitious goals for GDP growth over the next years, which he presents as top priority. Ecological concerns are entirely subordinated to growth efforts, despite a considerable legacy of environmental damage from the Soviet era. Accordingly, environmental aspects are only on the political agenda when they promise to deliver economic gains, as in the case of emissions trade (Kyoto protocol) or marketable innovations. The long-term political effort to reduce the economic dependence on raw material production would also reduce negative environmental effects. However, environmental concern is hardly ever mentioned as a reason for this strategy. The limited institutional base for environmental protection, in both state and NGO settings, has been weakened further by administrative reforms under Putin. Most of the responsibility for environmental questions has been transferred from a now dissolved separate ministry to the ministries dealing with the respective branches of industry.
Russia inherited from the Soviet Union an educational system with comparatively high standards, able to compete on a world scale in some segments. Under post-Soviet conditions, however, the country has been unable to put this educational potential to good economic use. Rather, Russia has faced mass emigration of top personnel. Funding shortages have now greatly reduced the quality of the state educational system. The private educational sector has not developed far enough to make up this deficiency. Research and development is still up to world standards in some areas, e.g. space technology, but in general, Russia is below the level of OECD countries in quantitative as well as qualitative terms. Russia spends 1.2% of its GDP on research and development and 3.1% on education.
3.1 Level of difficulty
The level of difficulty of the transformation tasks faced by Russia’s leadership can be considered moderate. Structural socioeconomic conditions that will dominate the political process for the long term are comparatively positive, with a high level of education, a moderate level of economic development, and quite a homogeneous and conflict-free society, apart from the Northern Caucasus. Weak traditions of civil society and deficits in the rule of law and in governmental administration have an adverse impact on transformation into a market-based democracy.
3.2 Steering capability
While Russian policies under President Yeltsin (1993-99) presented a largely desolate picture of incompetence and short-term power grabs, after President Putin took office in 2000, he immediately defined clear, long-term priorities that have dominated the policies of his administration until today. However, these long-term priorities are not consistent with the idea of a transformation to a market-based democracy. Politically, the main aim is control by the state executive over the legislative process and over the implementation of policy measures.
Accordingly, political reforms have served to consolidate the power of the presidency by improving control over parliament and over regional administrations. It has to be noted here, that contrary to many claims by Western observers, these political reforms as such are not undemocratic. Many of the measures proposed by Putin in 2004 have been demanded by Western analysts in the 1990s to promote a stable political system, especially the election of all Duma deputies through national party lists. This would mean the abolition of single-mandate districts. Other proposals are to strengthen the party system and parliamentary factions as well as develop stronger control by the center over regional governors in order to force the regions to accept the supremacy of national legislation. The increased control over regional administrations threatens Russia’s federal system but not democracy, which can exist in centralized states like France as well.
The main problem with these political reforms is that they increase the power of a president who is willing and able to use informal ways to circumvent the checks and balances of weak democratic institutions. Accordingly, the real threat to Russia’s democracy is the use of informal political pressure to increase state control over mass media, NGOs and interest representation by business elites. Informal pressure is probably also applied by the state executive to influence the judicial branch. This pressure indicates more than everything else that Putin’s main goal in the sphere of politics is control and with that stability and predictability but not democracy as such.
In the economic sphere, the state executive under President Putin has initiated a number of reforms aimed at the introduction or strengthening of market mechanisms; the land market has been liberalized, the tax system has been rationalized and the social welfare system is being liberalized. Negotiations over WTO membership are being pursued seriously. In most cases members of government are directly responsible for these reforms because they want to transform Russia into a market economy. However, for President Putin, the strengthening of market mechanisms seems to be more a means than an end in itself. His declared major long-term economic goal is dynamic GDP growth. A considerable part of the Russian political leadership is not convinced that market mechanisms are the best way to achieve economic growth. Moreover, when economic aims collide with political ones, the latter seem to dominate. A good example for this is the Yukos affair. Excessive tax demands, fines and the initiation of legal proceedings against major shareholders and the management have been used to destroy one of Russia’s best performing companies. The affair is also bad for the general investment climate as it demonstrates how vulnerable even big business is to political pressure.
Thus, it can be stated that the Russian political leadership prioritizes and organizes its policies according to strategic aims. However, these strategic aims do not focus on the development of a market-based democracy and in practice they quite often hamper the development of a market-based democracy, especially in the political sphere.
The executive branch has responded flexibly and has proved that it is able to learn to organize the political decision-making process. With its talent for power politics and the President’s great popularity, the executive branch has enough political authority to push its reforms through the legislative process. It remains to be seen whether it also has enough control over government administration to implement reform policies nation-wide. In this case, a learning process can be observed as the attention of the state executive is increasingly being devoted to administrative reform and the fight against corruption. However, so far it is not clear whether the political leadership will be up to this challenge.
Although the reforms under President Putin have improved resource efficiency considerably, Russia is still far from having achieved an effective use of resources. While a stringent austerity policy has yielded significant progress in the use of government funds, the use of staffing and organizational resources continues to languish because of the problems of an oversized, often corruptible and only modestly competent administrative apparatus.
The state budget has been consolidated and is showing a surplus since the beginning of Putin’s presidency. The level of state debt has been considerable reduced, leading to regular upgrades in the investment ratings of Russia’s sovereign debt. The processes of budget planning and spending discipline have been improved considerably. Whereas in the 1990s the state budget was often agreed only long after the beginning of the relevant year, this has never happened under President Putin. Spending targets have normally been met. However, there is no effective audit process and reports by the parliament’s audit chamber have, on most occasions been ignored.
With a share of 2% in total employment, the bureaucracy of the Russian state executive is not oversized in international comparison. However, its organizational structure and code of behavior is generally assessed as leading to considerable inefficiencies. The Russian government has reacted by instituting administrative reforms in 2003. As complete restructuring necessarily usually leads to short-term inefficiencies, it is still too early to assess the reform. What can be said is that Russia does still not have an efficient state administration. As a result, the coherent strategy of the political leadership that is being translated into legislation is regularly distorted during implementation. In the wake of reorganization, new conflicts between governmental agencies have emerged.
The implementation of policies is also hampered by a considerable degree of corruption. According to a World Bank survey from 2002, a third of Russian companies regularly bribes state officials. On the basis of representative polls in 2001, the Russian INDEM institute has estimated that more than $30 billion are annually paid as bribes in Russia. The government has reacted to this problem with a far reaching administrative reform. One of the main aims of this reform is to reduce the leeway of bureaucrats and to simplify business regulation in order to reduce opportunities for bribe extortion by state officials. As this reform is still ongoing, it is too early to assess its results.
Another obstacle to resource efficiency is a serious division of the Russian government into two ideologically opposed camps. The liberal reformers who were initially in charge of economic policy under President Putin have increasingly been sidelined by politicians with a secret service or law education background. Some of the liberals’ major reform projects, aimed at reforming companies close to the state like the gas or electricity monopolies, have been repeatedly delayed. The political pressure on Yukos has also been heavily criticized by members of the liberal camp. Putin’s economic adviser called it the scam of the year and spoke about Russia's transition to a model of state interventionism at a press conference in December 2004.
In summary, the views of both government camps are consistent with the strategic policy goals set by Putin. However, their ideas about ways to realize these goals are on many occasions incompatible and as a result some policies have counterproductive effects on other policies. Even more importantly many policies are not implemented properly due to bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption.
3.4 Consensus-building
Putin has achieved considerable progress in consensus-building compared with his predecessor Yeltsin in the 1990s. The notion of the “Putin majority” has now become a fixture in the country’s political vocabulary. Parliamentary opponents of reform have been successfully marginalized. Putin’s opponents in the regions have also seen their position weakened. A large majority of the population supports the president.
The appeal for broad-based collaboration to overcome the “state of emergency” has been a core component of Putin’s political rhetoric. Thus, the political leadership has been successful at depolarizing conflicts and has managed political cleavages in a way that makes escalation highly unlikely. For example, a partial transfiguration of the past has been taking the place of a social processing of historical acts of injustice. However, it should again be noted that the consensus developed under Putin is not primarily oriented to creating a market-based democracy. The major political actors agree on the Putin model of a ‘controlled democracy’ and a limited market economy. That means they accept the existing political and economic system, including democratic elections, as the primary means of transferring political power. However, they do not agree on market economy and democracy as strategic long-term aims and they do not object to violations of democratic standards, as in the case of biased election campaigns, and to violations of market principles, as in the case of the Yukos affair.
Strong supporters of reforms toward higher democratic standards are no longer represented in the political system. Strong supporters of liberal economic reforms have influential posts in the state executive, but they are not able to determine policies on their own.
As the development of politically active NGOs is seen as a potential threat to state control, the political leadership has only made very limited efforts to develop social capital among citizens and social groups. These efforts focus on apolitical forms of social organization and are mainly symbolic in nature. However, highly publicized meetings of leading politicians with representatives of NGOs may have a positive impact on public opinion. At the same time, NGOs engaging in politics or receiving support from abroad are being criticized by the leadership and are often subject to harassment by state agencies. The political leadership has in some spheres tried to create pseudo-NGOs under state sponsorship.
The political elite has increasingly restored symbols of the Soviet past. The reform of state symbols has returned Soviet symbols that had been rejected in the 1990s. Even the Stalin era of most severe repression is increasingly represented in a positive light. On the surface, this is due to the preceding 60th anniversary of the victory over fascist Germany. However, the underlying trend is the rise of political elites close to the former Soviet secret service and the military to political power. A critical assessment of the Soviet system and an examination of human rights violations of the past is nearly exclusively conducted by NGOs, which often face indirect harassment or at best ignorance from representatives of the state executive.
3.5 International cooperation
While Russia under Yeltsin cooperated with international partners like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it often misused international aid for inappropriate purposes, and applied it only to a very limited degree toward improving policies. President Putin, by contrast, rejects international aid. His public explanation is that Russia does not need foreign help in order to develop. It can arrange the necessary measures on its own. First, this idea fits in with the president’s rhetoric of “national self-awareness.” Second, it makes Russia less vulnerable to foreign criticism of how it deals with basic democratic rights.
Nevertheless, within its conceptual framework, the Russian government behaves consistently in international politics, and is therefore considered reliable by its foreign policy partners in the West. Russia has been included in the G8, although economic indicators do not support this decision. Russia has also made progress toward joining the WTO, especially through an agreement with the European Union. Russia joined the Kyoto protocol in 2004. For foreign investors, Russia still poses a higher political risk than Western countries. This is reflected in the ratings of international organizations like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. They have increased Russia’s ratings but the country still ranks below Western market economies. The country’s risk for foreign direct investors was highlighted in 2004 by the Yukos affair. Nevertheless, foreign direct investment in Russia reached a high point in 2004. The logical conclusion is that most foreign investors are willing to accept the higher country risk in order to participate in Russia’s economic boom. Thus, foreign investment is not attracted by a credible government policy but by economic prospects. The government’s policy has been contrary to business interests on many occasions, leading to critical remarks from Western politicians including the EU Commission and the ministries of foreign affairs of Sweden and Norway.
In relations with neighboring countries, Russia still applies a foreign policy concept based on ideas of regional hegemony. However, Russia has been unable to transform the CIS into its own “backyard”. It has accepted a U.S. military presence in Uzbekistan. It has not been able to pressure Turkmenistan into closer economic or political cooperation. Most importantly, Russia has not been able to prevent the political changes in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003-2004, although it was heavily opposed to them. In both cases, a political leadership closely connected to Russia was replaced by a political opposition critical of Russia’s role in the region and interested in closer relations with the European Union. International cooperation has been selective and rules set by regional and international organizations have sometimes been ignored when they were perceived as being contrary to Russia’s national interest.
4.1 Democratic development
Even before the period under review, the core characteristics of a democratic system had been formally established in Russia. There were especially significant deficiencies at the beginning of the period in the freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, combating corruption, and the social rooting of political parties and interest groups. There has been no visible progress in these areas during the period although the government appears to have serious intentions to reform the judiciary and to fight corruption. The development of the mass media and of NGOs, on the contrary, has been hampered by pressure from state agencies.
The massive human rights violations and restrictions on freedom of movement and freedom of the press, all of which have been associated with the second Chechen war since 1999, have been a considerable setback for the country’s democratic development.
Irrespective of these setbacks, the political system has remained stable under President Putin. The majority of the Russian population is not opposed to democracy as a system of government and supports the “Putin system.” In summary, Russia’s stateness and the quality of its political system have not changed significantly since President Putin consolidated his political power in 2000.
4.2 Market economy development
The socioeconomic situation improved slightly during the period under review. This development is mainly the result of economic recovery and less of state-sponsored measures. Accordingly, the improvement has been especially significant since the effects of the economic boom reached society in 2000. The dimension of this boom is described in the table below. It is noteworthy that unemployment has not been reduced substantially despite of high economic growth in a stable macroeconomic environment.
Table: Development of macroeconomic fundamentals (2000-2004)
7.1¹
Export growth in %
Import growth in %
10.9¹
Investment (FDI) in % of GDP²
Tax Revenue in % of GDP
Unemployment in % (ILO)
8,0¹
Budget deficit in % of GDP
Current account balance in billion $
60.1²
Sources: EBRD – Transition Report 2005; Russian Federal Service for Statistics; Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition. ¹estimated; ²Citibank Russia
The economic reforms initiated under President Putin substantially improved the formal institutional framework for market-economy action in several segments of the economic system. However, despite the strong quantitative and qualitative improvement in overall economic development serious problems remain in the economic regime. Regulatory deficiencies exist are still found in the banking system and capital market or the social system. Deficiencies in implementation are to be found in many areas of policy. Most importantly, the changes in the formal institutional framework have not been implemented in full in many policy areas because of bureaucratic inefficiencies, corruption or political interference.
As president Putin has successfully consolidated his power, any major changes in Russia’s political and economic development are unlikely before the end of his second term in 2008. Putin has made his political and economic aims clear, which allows for a solid prognosis.
In the political sphere most of Putin’s reform projects will go unchallenged. A change in the laws governing political parties and elections will lead to fewer relevant political parties. Regional governors will be appointed by the president and no longer elected. This will weaken the governors’ powers and strengthen the Kremlin’s in regional affairs.Reforms will also mean that regional governments will lose certain authorities to the national government. Political pressure on mass media and politically active NGOs will persist. The armed conflict in Chechnya will continue, as will the massive human rights abuses committed by the Russian military.
In the economic sphere, the executive branch will focus on the promotion of growth. However, it is presently unclear at present whether that means further liberal market reforms, like the break-up of natural monopolies and the reform of utilities, or whether the government will focus exclusively on control measures like the fight against corruption and administrative reform. It is also not clear how often the government will intervene directly in economic activities as it did during the Yukos affair. Russia’s economic policy seems to be standing at a crossroads.
However, an abrupt change in policy seems unlikely, as does a sudden recession. The government will continue to profit from the large revenues generated thanks to the high price of oil. There is no opposition to a continued policy of austerity. Therefore, economic growth is likely to continue, and development of the market economy will be limited.
Putin’s goals are clear and he is unwilling to alter his position in reaction to international criticism. External supporters of Russia’s development can either try to find a niche within the current system or withdraw altogether from Russia. It is not possible—at this juncture—to predict any significant changes when Putin’s second term ends in 2008.
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Paul McDonagh welcomes new signing Melissa Mitchell
McDonagh appointed as Development Coach
Report by David Brenchley
Page last updated at 3:20PM UTC, Wednesday, 14 August 2013
The Charlton women’s team are pleased to confirm the appointment of Paul McDonagh as head coach of the newly-formed development squad.
McDonagh is an experienced coach who is currently studying for his UEFA A Licence and also works as head scout and academy manager at Dartford FC.
The former Gillingham and Ebbsfleet United player has already had a number of training sessions with the Addicks and has overseen two friendly wins, including a 9-1 victory over Rusthall at the weekend.
After a highly-competitive recruitment process for the role, Paul came out on top and is now looking forward to helping shape the next generation of Charlton women’s team players.
He said: “I’m looking forward to being able to coach in-game tactics a bit more. I’m looking forward to basing my coaching around also trying to win the game as well as developing the players.
“It’s the sort of role that suits me currently in terms of it gives me the opportunity to really help develop players and that is what, at this stage in my career, is something I can offer a lot.
“I would like to think I can give them a good balance of technical and tactical information because they are still at an age where they need both.
“It’s not all about tactics and winning, you have to take on board some technical stuff as well. I’m looking forward to getting involved with it and hopefully they will really enjoy it.”
The development squad has been set up with the intention of providing a transition phase between youth football and senior football.
The squad will mainly be made up of players who were in our under 17 squad last season, with the addition of a number of talented youngsters brought in from other teams.
They will compete in the South-East Counties Division One, the highest possible tier they could be fast-tracked into, and McDonagh’s main aim this season “is to get everyone better”.
He added: “Seeing their standard at the beginning of the season, giving them individual things to work on and by the end of the season lets tick that box and if you get better at that halfway through the season, let’s maintain it and give you another challenge.
“In terms of results this season, I want to win as many games as possible. I’ve not seen the league we are in, in terms of the level of opposition so it’ll be interesting to see that.”
After injury forced him to end his playing career, Paul has held a number of coaching positions, including first team coach at Thamesmead Town and manager at both Rusthall and Bearsted.
In the women’s game, he was Centre of Excellence coach at Gillingham Ladies and, last season, managed Surrey University’s women’s football team.
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Adaptation and Discovery
Adventures in storytelling and other creative arts
Award Winning Fiction!
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Review: Pirates of the Caribbean 5: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Reminding myself that the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise was inspired by a theme-park ride is useful. As a writer of historical fiction, I find myself enjoying the movie much more. Such is the case for the fifth installment of the series Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales where fine acting and first class special effects shoulder most of the burden for creating an entertaining film. The caliber of the actors and producers, however, suggest this movie had much more potential than what was delivered on the big screen.
Multiple story lines bog down the plot in Dead Men Tell No Tales, and many viewers will find the story hard to track. New characters are introduced on top of a cast that had already expanded under the first three films. Dead Men Tell No Tales sequentially follows the third film (At World’s End), complicating matters, because the fourth film (On Stranger Tides) was a “one-off.” The story tried to capitalize on the popularity of Jack Sparrow and his crew independently of the established story line in the first three films, creating a nonlinear break in the story.
Dead Men Tell No Tales picks up with a young Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites, The Giver, Gods of Egypt), the child of Elizabeth Swan (Kiera Knightley, Bend it Like Beckham, Pride and Prejudice) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom, Curse of the Black Pearl, Troy, Lord of the Rings) on a quest to find the Trident of Poseidon, which legend holds will break all the curses of the sea including his father’s. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, Curse of the Black Pearl, Platoon, Edward Scissorhands) holds the key to finding the trident through his bewitched compass, which will reveal the location of its owner’s most prized object. Through a series of comedic mishaps, Henry discovers and joins forces with Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario, Maze Runner, Wuthering Heights), who also happens to be searching for the trident to vindicate her father’s scientific calculations left to her in a diary. Corina, however, is about to be hanged as a witch because no one believes her scientific ruminations as a brilliant astronomer.
When Jack Sparrow gives up his compass for a drink in a local tavern, a crew of undead Spanish Navy sailors led by Captain Armando Salazar (Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men, Skyfall, Before Night Falls) are released to continue their quest to rid the seas of pirates. This puts Captain Barbossa‘s (Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech, The Book Thief, Life and Death of Peter Sellers) pirate fleet in jeopardy. Barbossa is captured by Salazar, and his life is saved only when he relents to find Jack Sparrow. Everyone is now on the quest to find the Trident of Poseidon—Henry Turner to release his cursed father from the Flying Dutchman, Corina Smyth to prove her scientific brilliance, Barbossa to retain his power over the seas, and Salazar install himself as lord over the seas.
Keeping all this straight in difficult, and Dead Men Tell No Tales is prone to dialogue that fills in details and background for the audience (a classic case of Show Don’t Tell) with predictable results—slowing down the action. This is a problem because the Pirates of the Caribbean films are built on action sequences that include protracted sword fights, running duels among pirate ships and their pursuers, and chases through towns and jungles. Dead Men Tell No Tales has those scenes—one in particularly has Jack Sparrow dodging a ghost’s attempt to skewer him with a pike as he jumps from cannon to cannon between Bardem’s ship and the resurrected Black Pearl.
Juggling so many characters and story lines creates challenges for directors in a format as structured as film, where the the entire story must take place in a 2-3 hour window. Few characters really have a chance evolve. Henry Turner stays the same brash, precocious young man throughout the movie, although he falls in love with Corina. Salazar stays the same revenge and hate-filled pirate hunter. Corina becomes slightly less headstrong. While Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan make an appearance, but their time on the screen is not long enough to have a meaningful impact on the plot except to set up a sixth film. (Hint: stay seated through the final credits.) The lone exception is Barbossa whose hardcore piratical worldview sets up a personal dilemma that forces him to make a tragic but noble choice—and let’s Geoffrey Rush show his experienced acting chops.
Thus, the plot fails to bring much fresh to the story. The characters come off as flat despite excellent acting by the entire cast. (Even the brief part played by and credited to Paul McCartney—perhaps the only time a beetle is welcome on a wooden ship—was well done and, for me, worth the movie theater ticket price.) Dead Men Tell No Tales’ special effects, particularly those applied to the renderings of Salazar and his crew and the final battle for the trident, are also state of the art, so don’t be surprised to see a few technical Oscar nods to this movie next year.
Nevertheless, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is an entertaining film that stays well within the framework and spirit of the first three films in the franchise.
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This entry was posted in Books, Film Reviews, Films, Showing vs telling and tagged Dead Men Tell No Tales, film critique, Jack Sparrow, movie review, pirates, Pirates of the Caribbean on May 28, 2017 by SR Staley.
Review: Kong: Skull Island Box Office Blockbuster Falls Short
Kong: Skull Island continues to hold its own at the box office, generating $164 million in domestic revenues after seven weeks in theaters and $395 million outside the U.S. The film is definitely headed for a profitable ride, thanks in large part to the Chinese market. It’s persistence at the box office justifies a review, even if late, with a few comments about the story and its execution.
The film, directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, has a fine cast, and a plausible premise (as far as King Kong monster movies go): Bill Randa (John Goodman, Raising Arizona, Monsters, Inc.), a government scientist, has discovered scientific evidence of a strange creature on a remote island that requires investigation. Set in 1973, the waning days of the Vietnam War, the movie enlists an expert tracker (the Thor film franchise’s Tom Hiddleston as James Conrad) to help hunt the animal, a team of scientists to study it, and a military helicopter escort commanded by the aggressive Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson, Pulp Fiction, Dejango Unchained, The Hateful Eight). To counter balance the testosterone is a pacifist photo journalist (The Room‘s Brie Larson as Mason Weaver).
The digital effects are first rate. Many reviewers have commented on the exceptional attention given to animating Kong, one even going so far as to say the digitized gorilla steals the scenes from the live action actors. For the most part, I agree. That’s part of the problem with the film.
As a viewer, most people will connect more with Kong than any of the 13 actors and actresses listed as “stars”. The CGI artists create more believable action a tension between Kong and his underground nemesis Skullcrawler, who is inadvertently roused to the surface by indiscriminate fire bombing in an attempt to kill Kong. One by one, the platoon of non-stars and co-stars is picked off by either Kong (who is a misunderstood hero) or the skullcrawlers.
This points to a second problem: the cast is simply too big. Although Kong: Skull Island is within the larger King Kong franchise, the characters are not recurring. As such, viewers simply can’t get close enough to the characters to care much about them. This probably for the better, even intentional, since they all pretty much die. In fact, the character viewers are most likely to care about, forgotten World War II aviator Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly, Boogie Nights, Talledega Nights, Guardians of the Gallaxy ), enters the film half way through. Brie Larson’s character survives, but her character doesn’t have much depth—she begins as a pacifist, and finishes as a pacifist basically able to say “I told you so, peace is good.”
Third, much of the detail surrounding the actualization of the monsters appears to have been forgotten. For example, a major fight scene between Kong and Skullcrawler takes place in a lake. As they thrash about trying to kill each other, characters watching on the edge of the lake never experience unsettled water or a wave that would be inevitable from such a fight. In another example, somehow twelve helicopters lead the team in the island even though they are transported on a ship capable of carrying six.
Fourth, the humans are plot devices, not characters that drive the story. All of them are expendable, and none have a meaningful arc. The movie is really about the monsters (and to its credit doesn’t seem to forget this). All the players do is position themselves to be killed by the monsters. Sometimes, as in the case of Bill Randa’s demise, the acts seem implausibly suicidal. This isn’t unusual in a monster film, but the best movies in this genre use the story as social commentary. In the original King Kong movie, viewers are left to wonder who is the real monster. We use the story to reflect upon ourselves. Skull Island adds nothing new.
The plot holes, transparent plot devices, and careless squandering of acting talent combined to make a weak movie. That said, if someone is looking for a lot of great digital effects, a really cool rendering of a giant gorilla, and some fantastic supernatural fight scenes in an exotic jungle location, Kong: Skull Island is hard to beat.
This entry was posted in Film Reviews, Films, writing and storytelling and tagged film review, Kong Skull Island, movie review, story telling on April 29, 2017 by SR Staley.
Review: La La Land entertains with music, dance, and substance
The contemporary romantic dance musical La La Land continues to post strong earnings at the box office, generating $40 million domestically and $68 million worldwide (double its production budget). The film is destined to generate much more as a Golden Globe nominee and potential Oscar contender. I will be surprised if the film fails to bring home a major award.
Written and directed by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, 10 Cloverfield Lane), the plot follows the two aspiring artists in Los Angeles—Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist unwilling to compromise on the purity of his art, and Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress who finds the rough and tumble world of Hollywood dispiriting and overwhelming.
The characters are well developed, and their arcs are clearly defined over the course of the story. Sebastian’s intransigence in the face of pressures to bow to bland public musical tastes is artfully depicted in a scene in a lounge (managed by the reliably excellent J.K. Simmons) where he is fired for straying into free form jazz rather than remain focused on the uninteresting background music he was hired to play. His unwavering commitment to art nearly leaves him destitute but secures the admiration of Mia through a serendipitous meeting in the lounge.
La La Land incorporates much of Chazelle’s hard earned experience, as well as that of Gosling and Stone, into its scenes, giving the film a gritty realism while effectively driving the plot. For example, Mia is performing a heartfelt line when one of the casting director’s takes a personal call, an event borrowed from Gosling’s own auditioning experience. The callous nature of Hollywood and the film industry, as well as the idolatry that draws so many into it, is captured well through these small vignettes which increasing drive Mia to a breaking point when she stakes her savings and professional aspirations on a one woman show.
Chazelle’s story masterfully plays off the differing paths of the lead characters as it builds to the climax, a penultimate point that challenges the characters’ commitment to themselves and their art. But the weave of the story is much more complex than a simple clash of futures or paths. One of the more innovative techniques Chazelle uses reels back through time to chart different courses for the characters at key plot points. This begins at the outset of the film when the characters are introduced after a grand dance number choreographed on an LA freeway so congested traffic has come to a stop. But the technique is used several times to convey different outcomes, allowing the audience to internalize the storytelling technique while pondering more substantive questions about decisions and relationships. This becomes crucial for the film’s climax, bittersweet third act that focuses on the emotional and professional state of the characters to highlight what is ultimately a story about the choices we make and the personal consequences of those decisions.
The film is grand and soaring, much like the most audacious mid-twentieth century musicals, but the story is more complex and artful than many of the classics. Drawing inspiration from classic musicals, including Singing in the Rain and the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, as well as performances by theatrical numbers by Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and others, Chazelle has crafted a film that plays homage to this bygone film genre as well as the real-life experiences of those trying to make it in today’s film industry.
La La Land is distinguished by its production values, ability to entertain, and financial success as a contemporary musical. More interestingly, Chazelle’s determination to tell a complicated story adds to the richness of the film, giving his experienced actors the freedom to explore their characters and relationships. The ending will not be satisfying to many, but this is also his point: real life involves choices and meaningful trade-offs. Our decisions about which choices to make lead to different outcomes, and the results may not be completely satisfying even as we accomplish our professional goals.
This entry was posted in Characters development, Film Reviews, Films, writing and storytelling and tagged Damien Chazelle, emma stone, film reviews, La La Land, musical, ryan gosling on January 6, 2017 by SR Staley.
How to fix Jack Reacher
I recently saw the Tom Cruise action film Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. The movie was very serviceable as an action film—lots of fights, car chases, and take downs of bad guys—but I was disappointed overall. I personally believe Cruise is one of our best actors, and he, like Matt Damon, is capable of filling action hero roles quite capably even as he progresses through his mid-50s. (In fact, the sci fi action movie Edge of Tomorrow remains one of my favorite movies.) Even though Cruise has an entire wikepedia page devoted to his awards, he may be the best actor currently working yet to receive an acting academy award. Jack Reacher doesn’t come close to other movies in quality despite the talents of Edward Zwick, the academy award winning director of Shakespeare in Love and critically acclaimed films such as Glory, Legends of the Fall, and The Last Samurai. Why?
I explored this question using a rubric that includes seven criteria to help me think through a film’s overall quality and pinpoint its strengths and weaknesses. I’ve done similar things for character development in novels (see here and here).
Never Go Back is part of the Jack Reacher thriller series penned by British novelist Lee Child. The story puts former military policy investigator Jack Reacher into the center of a conspiracy to swindle the U.S. government out of millions of dollars through illegal arms sales. The inciting incident is the arrest of Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), who is in charge of Reacher’s old unit. She’s jailed for espionage, but is really a target for assassination because her investigative work uncovered the arms trafficking scheme. Reacher also learns of a paternity suit in the course of the investigation that claims he is the father of a 15 year-old girl, Samantha Dayton (Danika Yarosh). When Turner’s attorney is murdered, Reacher is framed for the crime. The assassins quickly link Dayton to Reacher, expecting to use her as a pawn to trap and kill Reacher. So, the film is off and running as action adventure crime thriller.
I thought Never Go Back was a enjoyable action movie, but fell short of being an excellent one. It relied too much on formulas, and not enough on creative storytelling. So, how did this movie fall short? What made the difference between mediocre and great? These are my thoughts based on my film criticism rubric.
Production values & artistic scope. Overall, the film didn’t have anything that pushed the envelop. The cinematography was state of the industry, but not state of he art. In leading action films such as Mission Impossible or Jason Bourne, technology is used to augment action sequences. Creative editing slows or hastens the pace. The camera shots engage the viewer with different angles and perspectives to illuminate motivation, create suspense, and immerse the viewer. I didn’t see much of this creative use of standard film tools and techniques in Never Go Back. It was yoeman’s work, for sure, but not much beyond it.
Plot, internal consistency & composition. The plot wasn’t particularly creative;
“good guy, but flawed, cop uncovers duplicitous arms dealer” is a pretty worn concept. Buddy rescue stories are also pretty common. The fact that the new boss of Reacher’s old unit is a woman (Turner) might have been innovative in the 1980s and 1990s, but in the 2010s it’s almost cliche. Similarly, the emotional threat of a family member being used to derail the good guy cop is also pretty common (remember Lethal Weapon?). Reacher is a drifter and loner, much like old western heroes, and being tied down by an unwanted child is also a familiar plot device (recall True Grit, Shane, etc.). While the story had an internal consistency—few loose ends left around at the end—its plot and composition were pretty stale. Also, the subplot of the uncertainty about paternity seemed contrived to add some humanity to the hardened soldier turned outlaw. In part this was necessary because Major Turner could pretty much take care of herself. So, some character had to be vulnerable, and that ended up being the teenager that might be Reacher’s daughter. She was never fully integrated as an essential element of the plot.
Story plausibility and dialogue. Okay, this is a bit of a stretch for action films—they are almost always implausible—but my assessments are put in the context of the genre. The dialogue was straightforward without nuance in Jack Reacher. The banter was standard and straightforward, with little wit; Audiences weren’t asked to interpret much beyond what was said by the actors. In fact, I found very little in the way of compelling visual storytelling, in contrast to other similar films such as Deepwater Horizon and Jason Bourne. What makes cinema different from literary forms is the ability to show character and emotion through facial expressions, physical action, and reactions to events and other people without resorting to dialogue to tell the story. Visuals substitute for literary description. The actors were asked to do little more than straightforward acting in the film.
Context in terms of genre. The film’s plot is relevant to the action film genre. After all, the U.S. is winding down the war in Afghanistan, and those weapons can easily be diverted. But the story doesn’t unfold in a creative way. The theft of arms is a standard plot for military television series such as NCIS or JAG. The theme simply is transported onto the big screen in a formulaic way. Even adding a corrupt inside guy n the military isn’t presented in an innovative or creative way.
Entertainment & audience engagement. Never Go Back was entertaining, but it didn’t keep me engaged evenly throughout the film. If I had received a phone call or text message, I would have been willing to leave the theater to take it believing I wouldn’t miss much by the time I returned. In part, this is because the film was predictable and lacked imagination. This movie could have easily gone straight to DVD and saved for late night parties for your teenager.
Character depth & arc. None of the characters really grow. At the end of the film, Major Turner is redeemed and goes back to her job running Reacher’s old unit. She is restored to her position rather than given new responsibilities, and her relationship with Reacher is not significantly deepened. Reacher goes back on the road, taking up his vigilante lifestyle, and the girl goes back to school (albeit this time living with her real mother who has cleaned up her act). Ironically, its the teenager—Samantha—that grows the most. She realizes the truth about Reacher, develops true feelings for him, but takes on a more mature and adult role as daughter to her mother. Unfortunately, Reacher and Turner on the leads in the movie, not the girl.
Social message & relevance. The film has virtually no social relevance or meaningful message, except that Jack Reacher might not forsake the child he may have fathered. The film ends with Samantha giving Reacher a phone for him to contact her, but he doesn’t embrace the new relationship. Similarly, showing bad guys as bad guys doesn’t really advance our understanding of human nature, or reveal new ways of looking at human relationships. It’s all standard formula action movie fodder.
I am not sure how these aspects of the film could be “fixed,” but actors, producers, and directors of Tom Cruise and Edward Zick’s stature and experience can certainly find ways to do it. I didn’t feel like I was ripped off sitting in the movie theater, but I certainly expected more and I believe the principals could have given more. With a production budget of $60 million, they could have. On the other hand, the film has generated nearly the same amount in domestic revenue and $136 million worldwide. So, in at least a commercial sense, the film is a success despite its artistic flaws.
This entry was posted in Books, Characters development, Film Reviews, Films, Keys to Success and tagged character development, film critique, film reviews, jack reacher, storytelling, tom cruise on November 26, 2016 by SR Staley.
The art of visual storytelling: Deepwater Horizon
The action film Deepwater Horizon has a lot of elements that make it one of the best movies of the year—a smart screenplay, excellent action, immersive special effects, and a compelling narrative. (See my review at the Independent Institute here.) Missed in almost all the reviews of the movie, however, is a brilliant example of foreshadowing through visual storytelling that, frankly, drives much of the success of the film overall.
As a story, Deepwater Horizon faced what many writers would think is a fatal flaw: everyone knows the ending. Deepwater Horizon was the name of the oil rig at the center of the world man-made environmental disaster in U.S. history (and perhaps the world): The Gulf Oil Spill. The full costs of the spill exceeds $45 billion by all accounts, and BP Oil is shelling out more than $50 billion in compensation, fines, and reparations as a consequence of the blow out.
Everyone knows what happened. Where’s the suspense? How can this be built into the story?
The film was marketed as a heroic action film, showing how ordinary men and women responded to an unthinkable event (even though they technically had trained for one). This is all fine and good, except that the filmmakers, like most storytellers, want their audiences to be fully vested in the characters—we had to care about them, really care about them, to want to know how they get out of this mess. So, we (the audience) needed backstory.
Some films will accomplish this through flash backs, or dreams, or memory tricks. Deepwater Horizon doesn’t use these techniques. The story (by Matthew Sand with screenplay help from Matthew Michael Carnahan) starts with the protagonist, rig technology guru Mike Williams, waking up in bed with his wife the morning he is heading out to the rig for a long assignment.
Boring. Most people in a relationship get up with their partner or spouse every day. And many, military people in particular, see their partners and spouses deploy for months and years at a time. Nothing extraordinary here. Some reviewers have dismissed this scene as an “obligatory” nod to family and traditional values. But I think this is much more significant and critical to the story.
Conflict drives stories, and these small personal conflicts—the husband going to work, not seeing his kids, etc.—are very minor in the greater scheme of things, particularly in the context of the world oil spill in history. A cardinal rule of writing is that the “inciting incident“—the event that drives the plot and arcs of the main characters—must begin early in order to catch the attention of readers and viewers. They don’t have to finish the arc, but characters must start down the road to transformation to keep the story fresh. And conflict drives the actions of the characters and builds tension in the plot.
Sand and Carnahan do something clever. They write in the 10-year old daughter, Sydney, who is giving a presentation on her dad’s job (played by Mark Walhberg) to her elementary school class. She describes (beginning at minute 9 in the collection of trailers emedded below) how, way back in time, dinosaurs roamed the earth. When they died, the dinosaurs became big bad black monsters (oil) that were trying to escape. When humans drill for oil, the monsters try to escape (the oil gush). Her Dad’s job is to put a lid on the hole that keeps the monsters in the hole, using honey to illustrate how mud is used to block the hole.
During the entire presentation, the daughter is showing what happens by first taking an opened soda can representing the oil reserves that will be tapped, driving a hole in the top using one of her father’s tools to represent the men drilling for oil, and then containing the oil by putting honey down a brass pipe fitting (the oil pipe) until it stops seeping from the can. Everyone is happy, proud of the daughter for coming up with such a simple, clever way to explain a very complicated job to her kids who, like most adults, know little, if anything, about oil drilling and its dangers. Then a chemical reaction leads to the soda exploding from the can—the “blow out”. The family runs from the spraying soda, showing they are powerless to stop it. Since it’s just a soda can, it’s all fun and games.
However, what Sand and Carnahan have done is use foreshadowing to bring the inciting incident into the earliest scenes while providing backstory that shows a close, respectful loving family at breakfast. Now, however, with our advance knowledge and the privilege of knowing the ultimate end—tragic blow out—we know that this family will be threatened, perhaps even torn apart or destroyed. We just don’t know how. We are invested in the main character. This is not an obligatory scene pandering to audience sensibilities; it’s critical to the story’s development and engaging the viewer.
Most of the reviews have focused on how the technical language of oil drilling is handled in the action sequences. Most people will not be able to follow the language, but it’s not necessary. Indeed, when I saw this scene, I realized that an important part of the sequence was to explain to the audience just how the blow out was supposed to be handled. The scene, and the daughter’s explanation, visually and orally explained the basic principles behind drilling and the tactics used to prevent a blow out.
But the scene also accomplishes something much more. It brings the inciting incident upfront in the film, into the opening minutes of the story. Now the audience is focused on whether Mike Williams—the father, the oil rig operator—will survive, whether he will make the right decisions, and, if he survives, how he perseveres through a tragedy that killed eleven men, injured scores of others, devastated an entire region of the Gulf of Mexico, and fundamentally changed the way deep water oil exploration is managed and regulation.
This is one reason why I believe Deepwater Horizon is one of the best films of 2016, and another reason writer’s can learn a lot from successful films and screenwriters.
This entry was posted in Characters development, Film Reviews, Films, writing and storytelling and tagged character development, Deepwater Horizon, inciting incident, Mark Wahlberg, plot points, storytelling, visual storytelling on November 13, 2016 by SR Staley.
Jason Bourne and visual storytelling
I once read in a book on writing screenplays that movies are 80% visual, and this is one reason why movies are so successful at connecting with audiences. Humans are visual animals, and they interpret their surroundings based on sight. All the senses are important, but when it comes to identifying or assessing threats, or devising strategies, we rely on our eyes more than any other sense.
I was reminded of this while watching the most recent Jason Bourne film based on the Robert Ludlum character and novels. The film is a direct sequel to The Bourne Ultimatum, and it’s aptly titled because the story in this movie is really about Jason Bourne trying to uncover his true identity. The entire cast–Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, relative newcomer Alicia Vikander and others–does a great job save for Julia Stiles playing Nicky Parsons (whose performance I thought was rather wooden). The plot is fast paced with two extended car chases, which should be enough to keep teenagers in age and heart more than engaged. In other words, Jason Bourne is an example of a big-ticket action film that’s also well produced on a big budget.
But that’s not what really impressed me.
Rather, the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film seemed like a masterful example of visual storytelling. We must have been five or ten minutes into the film before any meaningful dialogue was spoken by the main characters. Yet the entire story was essentially set up with visual cues and action.
The opening scenes have Nicky Parsons (Stiles) hacking into the CIA’s database to download files on the covert assassin programs run by the agency’s director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones). All she says, in effect, is the password to get into the warehouse were a platoon of hackers is working in a wikileaks manner to uncover dark secrets held by government. We immediately know she is active in trying to identify and expose the covert CIA assassin programs–Blackbriar, Treadstone–when she discovers a new program Iron Hand which is the surveillance programs of all surveillance programs. She also uncovers files that identifies Bourne’s father as a key player in setting up the initial Treadstone program. All this is done through Nicky’s actions–her expressions as she discovers different components, her fingers as she works the keyboard, the computer monitor as files and file folders appears–as movie goers look over her shoulder as she hacks away. She clicks on folders, opens and scans files, downloads them, and then escapes after the CIA identifies the hack and shuts the operation down. Thus, we, as onlookers, put the pieces together. We discover that the CIA is active in its covert program, the agency is more ruthless than ever, Nicky is hot on the trail and scared, and she still is doing a lot of legwork for Bourne. She cares.
In another highly effective exercise in visual storytelling, driven in part because Jason Bourne is a man over very few words, the director (Paul Greengrass) establishes that Bourne is alive and well, but living under the radar. Visual scenes with very little dialogue other than crowds yelling words depict Bourne in underground, presumably illegal, fights in Greece. That’s how Bourne now earns his living–cash in a cash society so nothing can be traced. No words are spoken by Bourne, but we know he is living a gritty, exhausting, meticulously low profile existence. And he’s tough and fit.
These are just a few of the sequences that depict a talented director and filmmaker practicing the art of “Show don’t telll.” For those interesting in film as visual storytelling, and thinking outside the box for ways to “show don’t tell” in narrative fiction writing, studying the first 15 minutes of Jason Bourne is well worth the effort.
This entry was posted in Film Reviews, Films, Showing vs telling, writing and storytelling and tagged Jason Bourne, matt damon, show don't tell, story telling, visual story telling on August 31, 2016 by SR Staley.
Dystopian literature and the reality of apocalypse
SR Staley standing before the iconic image of the atomic bomb’s aftermath: the A-Bomb Dome.
I recently spent some time at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. This is a transformative experience for many people because it’s the first time they connect the horrors of war to their lives in a tangible way. I can’t say I was transformed–I contemplate and reflect on violence a lot in my writing, whether it’s Isabella’s ethical struggles with death and life, Luke’s attempt to combat bullies, or the effects of campus sexual assault–but I found several elements of the peace park sobering and humbling. The atomic bomb truly was horrific in its ability to concentrate power, suffering, and obliterate human existence.
I’ve written more extensively about this on the Independent Institute’s blog, The Beacon, noting,
While many visitors to the peace park see the A-Bomb Dome as the iconic symbol of the horrors of total war, I didn’t find it a compelling image. It’s a building. The real horrors of war on what it does to human beings and our ability to create, innovate, and improve our lives. The Dome represents the destruction of physical space, and indirectly places. Dystopian YA novels get it right: The horrors of war are really human tragedies.
In Hiroshima alone, thousands of children were killed, most instantly, when the bomb blew up. Many of the survivors had to live in a world that is strikingly similar to the post-apocalyptic worlds in which novels such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Fifth Wave are set. In someways, many contemporary dystopian novels are, perhaps, imaginations of a world in which humans failed to show the restraint they did in the aftermath of World War II.
This entry was posted in Teen & YA fiction, writing and storytelling and tagged atomic bomb, dystopian fiction, Hiroshima, hiroshima peace memorial park on June 4, 2016 by SR Staley.
A pirate, a ninja, and a gens de couleur walk into a bar in 1784 New Orleans….
Tortuga Bay, 2016 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist!
A pirate, a ninja, and a gens de couleur wak into a bar in 1784 New Orleans….
The punchline? I think this is my next action/adventure series, probably launching after the third book in The Pirate of Panther Bay series is published by SYPP in 2017. The new series will follow three sets of characters as they branch out on their own at the end of the third book: Isabella and Juan Carlos, Gabrielle and Louis, and the ninja (yet to be named). New Orleans provides a provocative blend of Spanish and French colonial cultures. Adding a Japanese to the mix has the potential to ramp up tension and conflict immeasurably!
At the end of Tortuga Bay, I had decided to take Isabella to the U.S., cruising up the west coast of Florida to St. Marks, then Pensacola, and ending her journey in New Orleans. (I have plans for Isabella and Juan Carlos, there.) I wanted to make the third book a little more fun, however. So, I was thinking about adding a ninja. A Ninja? you (a reasonable person) might ask?
I already had a free black (gens de couleur) added to the cast up Isabella’s daring and desperate escape from Port-au-Prince and Dr. D’Poussant’s henchmen. Why another character? In part, each of my novels explores cultural conflict. The Pirate of Panther Bay series stretches challenges readers on a number of different fronts, both in terms of how colonial powers viewed slavery as well as pirates. Fundamental differences in the value of human life are explored in The Pirate of Panther Bay, as Isabella struggles with her place in the world as an escaped slave under the contradictory philosophy and social psychology in play in Catholic, colonial Spain. In Tortuga Bay, differences between and shifting alliances among France and Spain are central to the story. So, I think the third book is ripe for a new take on cultural differences. Why not add an Asian influence?
The glory days of the Ninja, masters of ninjutsu, were in medieval Japan between 1500 and 1700. Japan was unified in 1700, and the role of the ninja declined precipitously as their services against warring clans where no longer needed. This actually sets up the back story for my ninja pretty well. Since the demand for their skills largely disappeared, a ninja would have little reason to stay in Japan (particularly if the government was trying to shut them down). Yet, their skills would be particularly well suited for pirating, even in the Caribbean.
While the ninja were in decline after 1700, they didn’t disappear altogether. Indeed, their training forms the basis of To-Shin do, a self-defense oriented martial art created by Stephen K. Hayes. Hayes is a member of the Black Belt Hall of Fame and is credited as one of the key figures leading the revival of ninjutsu and introducing it to the U.S. (Also, my black belt is in To-Shin Do, and this marital arts provide the foundation for my novels A Warrior’s Soul and Renegade.)
Shiraishi Island, Japan. This old fishing village will be the boyhood home of the ninja in the third book in the Pirate of Panther Bay series.
The character really came together for me while visiting Shiraishi Island in the Seto Sea. The island would have been a tiny fishing village at the time, but my character will be discovered by a old ninja traveling through rural Japan. The old man will discover the talent of my character and bring him to a training facility in the mountains of the fabled Iga Provice of Japan. Then, he will make his way to the Caribbean. This is all backstory, but this background will be essential as his own series takes off from the Pirate of Panther Bay series.
I am very excited about this new series prospects!
This entry was posted in Characters development, martial arts, Pirate of Panther Bay, Tortuga Bay, writing and storytelling and tagged Caribbean, colonialism, Isabella, Japan, New Orleans, ninja, pirate of panther bay, Shiraishi Island, SYPP, Tortuga Bay on May 29, 2016 by SR Staley.
Tris Prior is more than just a buff, kick-butt character
I know that books typically have more depth than films, but YA fiction has tended toward the simplistic and straightforward rather than the complex and layered. Thus, I’ve written the last two posts on the Divergent film series, thinking that the books were not that much more complex than the books (see here and here). I was wrong. Or at least I am revising my thoughts based on the first of Veronica Roth’s novels in the series.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the book version of Divergent had a lot more going on than than a kick-butt heroine finding herself among the rubble of post-apocalyptic Chicago. Actually, the character of Tris Prior had a lot more going on. I have already written about how Tris is a much stronger heroine than Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games series. My belief if more firmly entrenched now that I’ve read Divergent.
Veronica Roth has given Tris a grand character arc that establishes her female protagonist as a deep thinker motivated by ideas. She just doesn’t want to be brave, she aspires to the nobility implied in selflessness for a higher cause. Hence, she carries the tattoos of both Dauntless, her chosen faction, and Abnegation, her family’s faction (which she never completely leaves emotionally). Indeed, her discovery and reconciliation of these “divergent” aspirations via her romantic relationship with fellow Dauntless faction member Four becomes a primary element of her identity as she leads the rebellion against Erudite. This is a far more subtle and meaningful transformation than that Katniss undergoes in the more survivalist focused Hunger Games.
Seeing Tris on this journey via Roth’s words was an unexpected pleasure, and elevates her to one of my favorite heroines in fiction.
Other heroines worth reading in fiction? Try
Careen in the dystopian Resistance series by Tracy Lawson (Counteract and Resist).
Isabella in the historical fiction Pirate of Panther Bay Series by SR Staley (The Pirate of Panther Bay and Tortuga Bay)
This entry was posted in Books, Characters development, Heroes and villains, Teen & YA fiction, writing and storytelling and tagged character arc, divergent, heroines, Isabella, pirate of panther bay, strong characters, Tris Prior, Veronica Roth on April 7, 2016 by SR Staley.
Where do good female characters come from?
While recently researching blog posts about the Divergent film series, I ran across a 2011 blog post from Veronica Roth, the author of the novels, that also discussed the origin of Tris Prior, her kick-butt female protogonist. Many readers might think that Tris was always the center of the story, but not so! Here’s what Ms. Roth writes:
“…Divergent really happened when a bunch of these pieces of inspiration suddenly coalesced in my mind as I was writing, and I got about thirty pages of a story from Four’s perspective down, and then set it aside because it wasn’t so good. It was only when I discovered Beatrice that I was able to write the full book, four years later.”
The observation that caught my attention was that she had started writing Four’s (Tobias Eaton’s) story, not Tris’s. But it was boring so she stopped, and didn’t get back to it until four years later!
Her experience is strikingly similar to mine when I was crafting The Pirate of Panther Bay back in 2000. At the time, I was writing a young-adult romance about pirates because I thought it would be exciting and different. The protogonist started out as a male. But after about 50 pages (I got further than Ms. Roth), I put the manuscript down because it was boring! My story was just another pirate trolling through the Caribbean for loot. Ugh.
I am not sure how Ms. Roth “found” Beatrice, but Isabella’s “birth” was actually quite analytical. Since I was writing fiction, and story turns on conflict, I asked myself what would happen if I made the pirate captain female? The story became much more interesting, because virtually any plot putting a woman at the center in a leadership position in the 1780s was going to create conflict and tension. This was particularly true on pirate ships where crews were superstitious and almost always banned women on their vessels. For Isabella to get on the boat in the first place, she would have to overcome significant hurdles. She would also have to be strong–she couldn’t be a stowaway or consort, or start out in a typical role. The path to the captaincy of a pirate ship simply couldn’t take that route.
More importantly, the conflicts created a fascinating story line that allowed me to really flesh out Isabella’s character as well as the major male protagonists. Each of the major characters had a dramatic arc and singular journey that would feed of each other. The results have been great, particularly in the most recent installment, Tortuga Bay.
I hope Veronica Roth talks more about the literary beginnings of Beatrice Prior. I found her character to be very similar to Isabella in terms of personality and temperament.
Now, if I can just get The Pirate of Panther Bay made into a major motion picture….
This entry was posted in Characters development, Keys to Success, Pirate of Panther Bay, SR Staley, Teen & YA fiction, writing and storytelling and tagged character arc, character development, divergent, Isabella, pirate of panther bay, storytelling, Tris Prior, Veronica Roth on March 29, 2016 by SR Staley.
What’s kept me up at night recently
Wild Rose‘s performances tell poignant story of hope and personal responsibility
Spider-Man: Far From Home puts the story back in Marvel superhero films
MIB International entertains despite simple plot
Anna‘s stylish action elevates its story
Dark Phoenix character-driven story swamped by superhero fatigue
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How Did Liberty Fare at Oscars 2019? – Michigan Standard on Roma shines with a little help from Mexican history
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SR Staley on Arrrrr pyrating good time in Algiers Point New Orleans
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