John Snyder's Errant Thoughts

My Poor Blog

I would like to apologize to my four loyal readers whose lives have been empty of meaning in the absence of my incoherent ramblings. No good excuse. I haven't been too busy. I haven't been doing anything better. I haven't been without things to talk about. In fact, several times, I was pontificating about something and my wife remarked, eyes glazed, "you haven't posted on your blog for a while, have you?"

I don't want to read too much into that comment, but it sounded like a hint.

No, my only excuse is that I've been spending far too much time playing MLB 2007, The Show on my PS3. I set up "season mode," but then I realized -- well, I knew this before, but didn't fully appreciate -- that a season is 162 games. Each game takes about 1 hour to play. That means to complete a full season, you would have to put in enough time to actually write your first novel.

Not that this dissuaded me. I dutifully played the entire month of April. Everything was wonderful. My beloved Red Sox were 14-10. But then I looked at the compiled stats for my pretend baseball season, and I realized that Manny Ramirez was batting .235 and Doug Mirabelli was leading the league in RBIs and batting over .500. I immedately took a real baseball bat, smashed my PS3 to smithereens, and got back to something useful....

Writing on my blog.

Adios!

Bizarre Thought

Every January 28, I remember one of the formative experiences of my youth.  It was 1986, I was in third grade, and the most exciting thing was about to happen.  A teacher was going to go into space.  This had special significance to me because I was fascinated with space travel.  I wanted desperately to be an astronaut.  It was all I wanted to do.

Then, on that cold winter day.  Boom!

What does NASA stand for?  Need Another Seven Astronauts.

What were Christa McAuliffe's last words?  What does this button do.

It was really awful.  So two days ago, I was staring out the window at work musing, thinking back to that time.  And it dawned on me, someone who was born on the day the Challenger blew up is 21 years old today.

I guess that's a bizarre, random thing to think about.  But it makes me feel old.

Gerald Ford and East Timor

It's a little out-of-date, given that the eulogizing of Gerald Ford has now subsided.  But I posted earlier about Mr. Ford, saying that while not a saint, he did some good things that we should appreciate now more than ever.

My mother brings to my attention one particular stain on Mr. Ford's record that is of particular relevance to my sister, Mary, who has spent a great deal of time in East Timor providing medical services in desperately poor and neglected areas -- sometimes at a serious risk to her personal safety and always at a cost to her physical comfort and financial well-being.

I am thinking in particular about President Ford's policy toward Indonesia and Suharto's invasion of East Timor in the mid-1970s.  As this column points out, Mr. Ford gave Suharto the green light to invade East Timor (and as it turned out, subject the East Timorese to unspeakable crimes against humanity, rape, enslavement, etc.).

Even worse, Mr. Ford immediately doubled military aid to Indonesia and, the story continues, "directed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then ambassador to the United Nations, to stymie the agency's efforts to halt the slaughter and coordinate humanitarian relief."  [More on Mr. Moynihan's role here.]

[Other well-regarded officials, such as Richard Holbrooke, have a checkered record on East Timor as well.]

Mary has told me first-hand of the grinding poverty still afflicting East Timor and the war wounds on so many East Timorese who managed to live through the decades of aggression, which are a daily reminder of the Indonesian atrocities that Mr. Ford (and his successors) aided and abetted. 

That Mr. Ford's presidency gave rise to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as policies in service of which Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Richard Holbrooke sullied their otherwise generally good records, is something to consider contra the Ford worship we saw a couple weeks ago.

New York's Bad Odor

In New York, the threat of terrorism always lurks just below the surface. 

There is the gallows humor about waiting to buy property until after the dirty bomb. 

New Yorkers like to appear unfazed at the threat, and in a strange way there is a sense of perverse civic pride at our city being worthy of a terrorist attack.  (The claims by residents of Iowa that the terrorists might next come after their corn silos seemed just pathetic in a "me too" sort of way.)

Part of the reason is that in New York, the threat is actually real, and it inflicts a real psychic cost.  This morning we woke up to a foul odor all over the city.  We still don't know what it was (as of yet).  We all had to cope with the momentary fear, quickly dispelled by Mayor Bloomberg (who handled the situation very well), that someone had set off a huge gas attack.

We have already returned to adolescent jokes about the source of the mystery gas that blanketed the city.  But there was a moment this morning when we were dead serious.

Introductory Note

Allow me to briefly introduce myself (in the perhaps unlikely event that anyone but my mother and my wife will ever read this).  I am a lawyer living in New York, an avid reader of non-fiction, a former performer in the Wenatchee Youth Circus, a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, and a great admirer of my wife and her many artistic pursuits – Milk Can Theatre Company (theatre) and Balzer Designs (arts and crafts).

I intend to use this blog as an outlet for my reflections and thoughts on my experiences and studies in life generally, as well as a means of allowing friends and family to keep track of me, even from far-flung locales.

Thank you for reading!