L’Express writer Aurélien Chartendrault (Now, doesn’t that name convince you right there that we’re talking about things French? That’s a “he,” by the way.) hitched a ride yesterday on the tractor of farmer Nicolas Combes, one of 1,200 farm-vehicles invading Paris’ city streets in a protest-action of around 10,000 corn and grain farmers unhappy about the prices they’re getting for their produce. The resulting video is below; in it, M. Combes gets the only speaking part and uses it mainly to go on about how he feels he can barely make a living anymore, and apparently also about some pointy-headed officials who are trying to get him to farm without using pesticides.

But here it’s best to leave all that stuff aside – indeed, best if you can’t understand French, although his enunciation is perfectly fine and without accent – so you can just concentrate on the sensation of riding through the Parisian scenery in a tractor-convoy.

Mon tracteur à Paris
Uploaded by LEXPRESS. – the latest news content.

What comes next? Inevitably something like “Grand Theft Tractor,” in a Paris setting – soon available for PSP, Wii and the XBox 360!

                          

Prompted by these concerns – and, to be honest, also by my essential indifference to the pure sport element of the events now happening in and around Vancouver anyway – I’d like to highlight for your consideration this interesting piece covering one mass outdoor sporting activity in which the FTD does boast extensive experience: scrimmages between demonstrators and riot police. A further consideration prompting me to do this is the concern that coverage of such ugly scenes on the Games’ periphery will be downplayed or even omitted entirely by the media (especially TV) that my readers might rely on for their “mainstream” news coverage.

So yes, from this FTD report it does seem that we’ve reached the remarkable point where the Olympic Games have now attained the same sort of infamy in the eyes of the world’s disaffected as other events like meetings of the G8 or G20, which prompts these inveterate protestors to make the pilgrimage to rail against the Capitalist System and the like at the spot to which the world’s news cameras are all temporarily aimed. Let me give you the lede here, a minor masterpiece of succinct summary (although not particularly alliterative in and of itself):

Eye-witnesses speak of “rather drastic scenes”: Right on the first day of competition it came to violent demonstrations in the Olympic-city. Glass store-fronts were shattered, autos and buses demolished and spray-painted. The police intervened in combat-gear.

And make no mistake, this was happening right downtown in Vancouver, with the mob of masked, black-clothed rioters numbering up to 200.

Who are these people specifically? They are youngsters for the most part, calling themselves the “Olympics Resistance Network.” They parade as their immediate complaint the high cost to Canadian taxpayers of staging these games – and they may very well have a legitimate grievance there – but out on the streets their rhetoric soon takes up the usual anti-capitalist tone. The Vancouver police chief is quoted as estimating that at least half of them are the usual-suspect anarchist groups (“traveling criminals”) that turn up regularly to riot at any event commanding world-attention, at least within the Western Hemisphere.

Ski Abu Dhabi!

Want another article about the Olympics that studiously avoids anything actually having to do with winter sports? How about one on the weather? As Michael Eder points out writing in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Where to, Winter?) weather questions have unfortunately been anything but routine. While the American Northeast is still digging out from record (and repeated) snowfalls and Northern Europe also can’t seem to get rid of the stuff, Eder points out that at Vancouver it’s been nothing but rain – for weeks now, virtually uninterrupted!

But that’s OK: the ice-related events take place inside vast, dedicated halls anyway, so it’s just neighboring Cypress and Whistler Mountains where snow is needed for the downhill events – snow, that is, or else some reasonable facsimile thereof. What they get is the latter, of course: white, icy stuff hurled on the slopes where it is needed by massive “snow cannons,” which is then preserved from unseemly premature melting by the application of dry-ice.

This may make winter sport purists unhappy, but the Olympic show must go on no matter what hand the weather-gods are willing to deal out to the host city when the time comes. What about Sochi, Russia, the resort-city on the Black Sea where the next Winter Olympics are scheduled to be held in 2014? Is there snow there now? Eder poses the question, but does not even bother to go find out the answer, because his point is that that answer is irrelevant in the face of modern snow cannon/dry-ice technology. So why even continue to restrict Winter Olympics candidates of the future to those cities in indisputable cold-weather zones? Technology clearly matters now more than mere weather; why not England, why not the Netherlands? Indeed, why not Abu Dhabi, where the oil-sheikhs have in fact already built indoor skiing and skating facilities and would surely be delighted to build more, this time to Olympic standard, should they be chosen to host the Games. Mountains, you say? Yes, there are mountains available in that area, namely along the United Arab Emirates’ border with Oman. And, as we have seen, snow for selected slopes on those mountains can now be made-to-order as well.

                          

The Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung also released a Friday-preview piece yesterday (End-Time scenarios in Iran), which generally agrees with Klein’s evaluation, going on to provide additional supporting details. For one thing, Rafsanjani’s speech is to be televised on Iranian State Television; for another, both the main putative loser of that June 12 election, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, and another high-placed ayatollah who has been supportive of him (as well as formerly serving Iran’s president himself), Mohammad Khatami, will be sitting there in the first row, as we learn from Moussavi’s Facebook page.

Klein indulges in a bit of speculation about what Rafsanjani might say; the Tagesspiegel writer(s) (no by-line; we’ll just use “she”) rather speculates on how this rather astonishing occasion has come to be allowed in the first place. She offers two possibilities: Maybe it’s the result of a behind-the-scenes compromise whereby concessions have been made and assurances put forward so that Rafsanjani intends to make use of it, in effect, to back down and lower the heat now focused on the official government, to “save the Republic.” Or maybe, instead, Rafsanjani has used his still-considerable influence to power his way into the speaking engagement, which the reformers intend to use as an occasion to bring out into the open the very real rifts that have opened up within that official government.

Surrender or else going on the attack, then. Either way, tomorrow figures to be an important milestone of some kind. And the list of quotations which this article’s author goes on to use to round it out strongly imply that the evidence points to the latter, attacking interpretation. There are the recent comments of Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri, still influential but with no official position, who is quoted here at length, declaring among other things that “The Country belongs to the people, and not to anyone else” and comparing the behavior of the present regime to that of the Shah in 1979, earnestly hoping that they won’t imitate him in recognizing “the call to Revolution of the people” too late. Shirin Ebadi, the (female) lawyer and winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize is also quoted here, declaring that the present government has effectively lost its legitimacy through the unacceptable violence it used in suppressing the protests. Possibly most ominously, though, are the comments reproduced here from the website of one Mohsen Rezai, long-time Chief of the Revolutionary Guards, who warns that the whole System is on the brink of an “inner collapse” unless the government and opposition sides can get together to fashion some sort of compromise.

                          

Now there is a report in the Dutch newspaper Trouw that some form of punishment is headed the team’s way. No less than the Iranian parliament today demanded an explanation from the Iranian football association and threatened the team with sanctions of some kind.

On the other hand, this news report, while somewhat short, nonetheless manages to mention twice that the Iranians were playing against Japan, when it was really the South Korean team. Should we therefore believe anything else it says? I recommend “Yes,” as Trouw is really usually among the better of the Dutch dailies. For what it’s worth, this piece is sourced to the Dutch national news agency ANP, anyway.

UPDATE: Yes, you better believe: via Andrew Sullivan’s weblog, word comes from the Guardian that four of the six players who dared to wear the green wristbands have been “retired” from football.

                          

Democratic convention: plenty of black-, brown-, etc. skinned people hanging around, many of which female; Republican convention: Very few of these; instead, relatively many “sturdy to fat white men,” in clothes more formal than he remembers seeing in Denver. Democratic: live band in the hall, lots of dancing; Republican: piped-in music, about the only dancing being that routine with all their identical cowboy hats that the Texas delegation performs. Democratic: a high-tech podium with a large video-screen upon which you are sure to see the live head-shot of someone being mentioned in the speaker’s speech, if said subject-person is at all to be found in the convention hall; Republican: an installation not so technically adept, basically calibrated to display humongous photos of a young, wounded John McCain. (Say, did you know that he spent quite a few years captive in Hanoi as a North Vietnamese POW?)

C’mon Levi – Lose the Kid Already!

Remarque actually uses the majority of space in this blog-post of his to grouch about his lack of access to those whom he really would like to interview. I guess that’s about what we can expect from such a rank journalistic outsider (“Interview request from the Volkskrant? Who dat?”), but he also does not help his cause with his rather eccentric choice of subjects. He wants to interview the McCain boys, because he remembers reading in John McCain’s autobiography about how McCain really didn’t want to go into the military, but felt he had no choice because both his grandfather and his father had become highly-accomplished naval officers. They have also gone into the military: do they feel the same way? And he also desires dearly the opportunity to pose a question to another figure scheduled to show up in St. Paul, one cast into public renown only recently, namely Levi Johnston, that hockey-mad Wasilla High School senior who got Bristol Palin with child. And the question would be along the lines of “C’mon Levi, what if your future mother-in-law didn’t happen to be the right-wing, anti-abortionist Alaska state governor: would you still be getting married and having the kid?” From the indication on Levi’s MySpace page (“I don’t want kids” – MySpace profile since taken down), he rather suspects the answers would be in the negative.

Remarque also has includes a head-shot of Levi in this article, and he is indeed said to be a hunky redneck, but ladies (and you non-traditional males), there’s no need to click on Remarque’s link just for that. That very same head-shot, plus another photo of him in action on the hockey-rink, plus a demure portrait of the mother-to-be in hoodie-sweatshirt, and then of course all the details about the love-affair known as of this point are available in English courtesy of the New York Daily News. (Britol Palin’s pregnancy was an open secret back home, and the lede: “He’s a superhunky bad-boy ice hockey player from cold country; she’s a chestnut-haired beauty and popular high school senior.”) In fact, if you compare them you can tell that that’s the same photo of Levi that Remarque uses on the Volkskrant page, but it’s somewhat distorted. Oh, and check out the hockey-rink picture, specifically the advertising hoarding to the rear. “Supporting Valley Hockey: Valley Urology“: Alaska really does seem to be some sort of different country, doesn’t it?

Street-Fighting for Universal Health Care?

Speaking of a different country, let’s turn briefly now to France, to the French Communist Party organ L’Humanité and its coverage of (as you might expect) the street-demonstrations happening outside the Republican convention itself (Wave of arrests at the Republican convention; no by-line). The article writes of 10,000 showing up to protest on Monday even as the convention itself was reduced to the bare administrative minimum out of consideration for Hurricane Gustav. According to L’Humanité, those protestors were objecting to the War in Iraq, which is also how I heard it elsewhere. On the other hand, yesterday’s (i.e. Tuesday’s) protestors were said to be demonstrating “for universal health care, better social protection, and free university tuition.” Those are all things the French Communist Party stands for, but somehow I tend to doubt that this is an accurate portrayal of their policy platform. The article does also note how these demonstrations in Minnesota sparked a number of violent confrontations with the police, as compared with the demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Denver which passed without any such incidents. It also mentions three journalists who were arrested while covering the demonstrations (against “this convention,” as the article puts it, “which would not suffer any criticism”), including the founder of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman.

This is all good red-blooded leftist journalism, from a source which, even if foreign, George W. Bush would still also be glad to label as the “angry left”, describing circumstances that certainly lead to violent confrontations between demonstrators and police (although the question remains open whether that violence was mainly the fault of the former or of the latter). I was disappointed, though, because it seems there was a deliberate wave of preventive searches and arrests that occurred last weekend, before the convention even started. Talk about your violation of First Amendment (and Fourth Amendment) rights, talk about intimations of an incipient police state: L’Humanité could really have had a field day reporting on that! I’m sorry I didn’t see anything like that, but perhaps I just missed it – remind me to go back and search through my RSS reader again.

                          

And then there is the rent-a-spectator operation, revealed by Der Spiegel (China Puts On-Order Applauders in the Tribunes). It’s truly a bummer for anyone on that committee to have to gaze upon empty spaces in the spectator-stands at any of the athletic events they have spent so much time and effort organizing – and, more crucially, from which televised images might be broadcast back to anywhere else in the world (not to forget the rest of China). Ah, but always remember that bodies are extraordinarily easy to find -and then to manipulate – in a state with a population in excess of 1.3 billion and an authoritarian regime. So for many of the events that have taken place already it is clear that people (Chinese, of course) have been shipped in to give the impression of a full, raucous house. (I’ll call them rent-a-spectators here, and similar terms, although do understand that these people are volunteers, at least according to our old friend Wang Wei, the committee vice-chairman.)

How do we know about this? Quite simply because it is obvious: the Olympic authorities make no attempt to camouflage their rent-a-crowds, and indeed these are generally unmistakable in their identical yellow T-shirts. (It seems a special workers’ contingent was sent to cheer on the early field hockey matches, all wearing shirts – color not disclosed – with the English slogan “Cheering from Beijing Workers.”) Oh, and they really pour it on with the unbiased applause – meant for all sides in the competitions they are witnessing.

Why are these made-to-order spectators necessary in the first place, given the reports of widespread sell-outs among the Olympic events? Well, because just because someone has bought a ticket – or has otherwise attained it – doesn’t mean he intends to go use it. But each rent-a-spectator does have firm instructions about what to do if/when the person who has actually paid for the seat shows up: the stand-in is to take his yellow T-shirt and get lost, immediately. Still, the Olympic authorities are already trying to come up with ways to bolster what you could call “sincere” event attendance. It’s too late at this point to undo the tightening of visa standards that the Chinese government put through prior to the Games’ start – they had to keep out potential protestors or other subversives, you understand – and so far the concept of just throwing open the events to whoever wants to come, for free, is still beyond consideration. But it seems they do intend to try to get more tickets in the pipeline to travel agencies (for foreigners) and to local organizations (for native Chinese).

UPDATED: And now there is this. (English-language link from the BBC News site, until I can find a suitable non-English-language one.) Didn’t that sort of thing sink Milli Vanilli back in the 1990s?