Benghazi Barbecue: the almost accidental death of an American ambassador

September 13, 2012

Clipped box hedges and manicured bonsai trees. Strolling through the grounds in football tops and Ts. No hurry. The sound of crickets, then it’s someone’s phone chirping. One guy with a serious camera, others make do with their mobiles, holding them out towards the cauldron of flame. Are we in the Olympic Park? No, it’s a car, flaming too fiercely to be doused out in the adjacent swimming pool; and behind the burning vehicle (under a car porch in true suburban style), the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is going up in smoke. Right now, American ambassador Chris Stevens (Californian veteran of the Peace Corps, fluent in Arabic, friend of ‘the Arab Spring’) is succumbing to smoke inhalation. But Stevens has not been targeted by terrorists. Hardly anyone knows he’s arrived from the capital, Tripoli, especially not those – not rioters, not quite as innocent as bystanders – who only want to have been there when a little bit of America was burning. By the morning after, the compound will look like a real crime scene: blackened buildings, ransacked interior, the pool half-full of debris. The night before, though, if you agree to mistake small arms fire for firecrackers, it could have been a party getting out of hand.

Move Along, Please

September 11, 2012

The late summer had been due to turn autumnal, but London was allowed one more day (Monday 10th September 2012) solely to bask in the success of the Games. A Victory Parade (Mansion House to the Mall), crowds along the route, thick as cream (‘many thousands’ – nobody even tried to count ‘em), and 800 gleeful Olympians and Paralympians floating above their shouts and cheers. The whole affair as bumptious and good-natured as Boris Johnson addressing the athletes: ‘you produced such paroxysms of tears and joy on the sofas of Britain that you probably not only inspired a generation, but helped to create one as well’. The entire city as bright and playful as BoJo’s hair. Yet already something wistful in the air. This was the last moment of spontaneous unity; the only proper repeat of the unrepeatable. All the rest is propaganda. Sponsored re-runs will turn the winning Games into a series of also-rans, if we let them; unless we resist the eye-candy of endlessly repeated highlights. Better to let this moment go, and perhaps one day we will be surprised to come across it again, unexpectedly evoked in a new moment, each of them enriched by association. What’s yet to come will be all the more splendid, if in the meantime we have not over-used the colour of memory.

Touched

September 9, 2012

Mock Tudor Surrey, home of The Good Life (mid-career, moderate achiever jacks in his job and joins his gorgeous wife in turning their ample garden into a smallholding complete with piggery), now accessory to a drive-by shooting hundreds of miles away. Instead of the al-Hilli family (they sound jolly, don’t they?) returning home from their Alpine holiday (last outing before the girls are at school), police and the media have set up camp around their house in Claygate. Instead of painting the doors of the second garage (it needs doing), in face masks and protective suits (protecting potential evidence, of course), officers are stripping down the house in search of clues. The road outside has a peculiar liveliness. Not only police following procedures or a sudden flurry of photographers (maybe she’s a relative: snap, snap, snap). Mainly it’s those sensible-looking, not-really neighbours (they must have been sensible; they made it to the stockbroker belt) prompted to pay their respects to people they never knew and bodies that aren’t there. Out of their ordinariness they come, carrying flowers and asking the policeman at the garden gate to put theirs’ near the house (already too many: ‘I’m sorry, madam, they will have to stay outside’). Drawn here – though of course they wouldn’t have wished it on anyone – to touch the hem of the extraordinary. Now heading home in the late summer sunshine, just as their forefathers would have moved back from the altar rail.

It’s All About The Boy

September 8, 2012

On one side, the prime minister. Making eye contact, hands at chest height, fingers splayed, saying: ‘it’s like this’. Full-on explanatory mode, right? While the p-m continues to expound, on his right-hand-side (but maybe not his right-hand-man), Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister, fields a different question. Nick (David Cameron had to ‘Dave’ himself for a while but Nick was always Nicked) is leaning back slightly, arms folded, brow furrowed. The bouncer’s position. Listening to the loser who’s trying for a squeeze on the door, staying silent and at the same time saying: I’m taking this for now but I could rush you any time I like. Not clever, Nick, to let yourself be seen in this aggressive-defensive posture. Prompted, I’m pretty sure, neither by a barbed question put to you nor a sharp point sticking into you, but by the mere presence of a beautiful blond boy. Standing in between the politicians, immediately the centre of attention. Son of the mum you were photographed having coffee with earlier (minimalist white mugs on the kitchen-diner table), recent occupant of a new property in the housing development (Aldermere, Cheshunt, Herts) you came here to be associated with. Because Britain will boom if there’s a building boom, geddit? But their association with the son of the house, has left both ministers upstaged. Downing Street officials should have remembered the adage about (not) working with children and animals. The child in question has turned away from Nick to look up at Dave (well he would, wouldn’t he?), who is still expostulating to someone else. He would have to look up at Dave, wouldn’t he?, because the boy is a good foot shorter than the prime minister. Yet this line of sight, from junior up to senior, is richly ironic. In the boy’s eyes there is a look of wonder, amazement. But not, I wannabe like you, you’re amazing; rather, where on earth have you parachuted in from, stranger? They could be creatures from different planets, this boy and his uncles-for-a-day. He already knows that the avuncular ‘power duo’ (Hertfordshire Mercury) can do nothing for him. read more

E Pluribus Unum

September 7, 2012

Still cool as iced-coffee, even now he could have walked in off the set of Mad Men; though he tells us these are different times and he himself is different, having sent young men to die in battle, having held their bereaved parents in his arms. Seeking a second term, Barack Obama is still doing it right. It’s a performance, yes (nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Charlotte, North Carolina, September 2012); but that does not mean it’s false. When Obama reports that falling to his knees was the only correct posture for a man laid low by the responsibilities of office, his humility rings true. When he addresses ‘America’, above all when he calls out to the only person with the power to maintain hope and refrain from cynicism – ‘you’, the timing is perfect. So what if it’s rehearsed? Is the Catholic mass fraudulent because it’s been practised before? Bonded to the people in the hall – expectant, ecstatic, Obama becomes their celebrant. They are transfixed by him as he is transfigured into all of them together. Standing in for the best of each; standing tall as the best of all. Holy Father Obama, your communion wells up out of the convention centre and washes over every TV viewer.

The Colour of Desperation is Orange

September 6, 2012

Bright as a fire marshal’s vest, corn cobs piled high in front of the villagers’ houses. Is that what you would have lived on, Qu Huaqiang, if you hadn’t entered a government office in China’s Shandong province, and blown yourself up with home-made explosives? Twenty years after the big city accident which exiled you to your home village, perhaps you couldn’t stand the corn getting stuck between your teeth yet again. Almost 20 years ago, same vintage as the construction job that crippled you, London’s ‘postmodern’ building boom produced No 1 Poultry, EC2. As featured in H.M. the Queen’s camp Olympics cameo with James Bond; clad in that garish, marbled limestone which has been ageing orange ever since. Were you sad to see it hadn’t remained salmon pink, Madame X (unnamed 30-something Asian female in business attire)? Is that what tipped you over the edge of the restaurant roof garden? Leaving behind a floral print bag and a glass of wine (one sip taken). Plummeting past eight floors of Aviva offices – viva meaning lively, full of life. Falling to the ground face down – hummph, in another desperate death.

Cover-Ups

September 3, 2012

The Christian girl accused of burning the Koran, helped into an armoured car with her whole head hidden underneath a white sheet. The Pakistani imam accused of fabricating evidence against her, led into court with his faced bandaged – for anonymity, not because of injury. To the West, an Egyptian newscaster appears front-of-camera wearing hijab. To the East, Chinese fashion favours the face-kini, a new item of beachwear combining ski-mask with balaclava in a High Street iteration of S&M. Nothing spurious about the ostensible reasons: respectively, to prevent reprisals against the accused and their families; religious observance; high status accorded to pearl white skin. But, these aside, this age of self-presentation also reveals a strange allure in covering up.

Pace of Change

September 1, 2012

Debris shoots out horizontally. Arterial spray. Twin towers lean towards each other. About to embrace? They never get the chance. The crowd ‘ooohhs’ and ‘aaahhs’ – approving noises with only a hint of surprise – as two skyscrapers crash to the ground and rise again solemnly in slow moving circles of dust and rubble. This is the southern Chinese city of Chongqing, where the cycle of construction and reconstruction is anything but slow. Demolished to make room for something bigger and better, these old buildings lasted less than a decade.

The Man With No Name vs Invisible Obama

August 31, 2012

If you were alone in a lift with POTUS, what would you ask him? At the Republican National Convention, Clint Eastwood came on stage to play a version of this game. Except that the Hollywood star formerly known as The Man With No Name (TMWNW, Spaghetti Westerns) didn’t actually ask a question of ‘invisible Obama’ (headline, Reuters). He said he was going to, then turned the phrase round to challenge the president’s record on unemployment. Referring to ‘the 23 million unemployed in this country’, the actor-director sounded short of breath. Was he choked by barely suppressed anger and sorrow, or just acting? Either way, in his cameo role he called into question the high level of emotion surrounding Obama’s election (‘Oprah was crying, even I was crying’), compared to the low grade attention doled out to the unemployed. Clint Eastwood is an old man now but he did not appear out of date. The eyes are set back further, weakening his famously unstinting gaze; his hair is un-seriously wispy and the perfect nose is just too damned perfect. But there’s still the grain of his voice and that fascinatingly implacable face – long and hard as the faces of Easter Island. When the camera panned round, however, to the RNC delegates applauding him, boy, were we thrown back in time? On the money, of the moment, yet TMWNW was addressing the past.

Ryan rides the storm

August 28, 2012

Winsome from Wisconsin. The Ruminating Republican. If Mitt Romney is wooden, his vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is Woody from Toy Story. Were he conventionally handsome it might cramp the style of the senior partner. But instead of the mature man, Ryan (42) is Mr Almost Grown. Absolutely not Mercutio, more like Sugarfoot or the Sundance Kid (though not as fully formed as Robert Redford), especially with his lips forming a rueful curve and his hair brushed forward to evoke the crew-cut-that-used-to-be. Whether or not it ever was, there is now a poignant contrast with Romney’s slicked back coif: elder to younger; generation to generation. Ryan is a picture of what integrity looks like just before it draws to a close. That’s his image, anyway, and with proceedings delayed because of Isaac storming the town, at the Republican National Convention there’s not much to do but doodle.

World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Author Archives: Andrew Calcutt