Quick Takes

So...I've been at this now for six months. Yesterday's post was No. 150. And, as has become my custom, it's time to start or finish a month with some random tidbits lumped under the umbrella of Quick Takes. Before I begin, thanks to everyone for reading this blog, even if sporadically, and especially so to anyone who's taken time to post a comment.

-- A shout-out for National Geographic. Some people may make fun of N.G. as boring and old school. Not me. Every month that it arrives, it offers spectacular photography and superb writing, which together illuminate issues and cultures around the world and transport me to unfamilar, unreachable places.

In this month's issue alone, for instance, there's a great feature about king penguins on Possession Island, north of Antarctica ("Every Bird a King"), and a gripping a story about the failed state of Somalia ("Shattered Somalia"). See if these excerpts pull you in:

First comes the Noise, the turbulent din of king penguins calling, fighting, courting, like the ultimate schoolyard uproar. Then the smell hits, a choking reek of fish and ammonia from the birds' guano. But the assault on ear and nose is only a teaser for what awaits the eye. When photographer Stefano Unterthiner climbed a volcanic ridge on Possession Island—a wet, wind-blasted speck in the Crozet archipelago some 1,400 miles north of Antarctica—he found himself staring into a valley filled wall-to-wall with king penguins, tens of thousands of them, all standing as if gathered for a mass rally. The occasion was summer in the Southern Hemisphere—egg-laying season, the time when penguins, so agile and quick in the water, clumsily come ashore to molt, find a partner, and with luck produce a new crop of chicks.

And this...

This land is bred for trouble. Its nearly 250,000 square miles are, for the most part, deadly dry. Somalia's inhabitants have engaged in a constant competition for its scarce resources—water and pasturage—since antiquity. According to the great Somali ethnographer, I. M. Lewis, Somalia's occupants "form one of the largest single ethnic blocks in Africa." By tradition they are herders of goats and camels and cattle who share the same Islamic faith and the Somali language, and until the colonial era in the late 19th century they continuously occupied much of the Horn of Africa—including what is today Djibouti, northeastern Kenya, and the eastern portion of Ethiopia. In the Somali psyche, fierce nationalism coexists with equally fierce pastoral individualism. It is not their way to look to government for solutions. What held Somalia together—and sometimes drove it apart—was its elaborate clan system.

-- Putting a face on the president's critics. A thoughtful piece in the Aug. 30 New York Times Magazine by Matt Bai ("The New Old Guard") reminds us of the difficulty Barack Obama had connecting with older voters in last year's Democratic primaries and suggests what lies behind the "generational unrest.

For all the shouting that has dominated these town hall meetings on health care lately, they have yielded a few important insights. The first is that the town hall itself has probably reached the end of its usefulness in the Internet age; if you’re looking for thoughtful dialogue, you might as well hold your next meeting on the stern of a Somali pirate ship. The second is that we now have a visual sense of the kind of voter who is militantly opposed to Obama’s health care agenda and, more broadly, to the president himself.

The typical anti-Obama activist tends to be white, male and — perhaps most significant — advanced in age. A poll conducted earlier this month by CNN and Opinion Research showed a rather stark age divide when it came to health care: 57 percent of voters under 50 said they favored the outlines of a Democratic plan, but that number was a full 20 points lower among voters over 65. In three Pew Research Center polls going back to April, senior citizens consistently gave Obama’s job performance lower approval ratings than did than any other age group.

Photograph of Mogadishu, Somalia by Pascal Maitre