Giving thanks for small mercies
Because of the day that's in it, and because the world is turning inside out. There's also a big shakeup at Al Jazeera, and another at CBS News. . .
The war has not ended, U.S. president Donald Trump was rightfully passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize, Hamas has declared that it will not give up its guns, and its death squads are doing a roaring trade in the slaughter of dissidents and anti-Hamas insurgents in Gaza. And Trump seems to think that’s understandable.
Whatever happens in the course of the summiteering at Sharm El- Sheikh we should savour the great events of the day. Never mind for now that the shifting formulae for Israeli-Palestinian peace is less a matter of Trump having brought the Arabs around than of the Arab States and Europe having talked some sense into Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
The hostages are home, and in Canada, it’s Thanksgiving Day. During the day I laugh and during the night I sleep. My favourite cooks prepare my meals, my body cleans and repairs itself, and all my work goes well.
That’s from Leonard Cohen’s poem I have not lingered in European monasteries, which is here in English and Hungarian. I closed last Thursday’s newsletter with Cohen’s Hallelujah so I begin this post with Cohen today, but why link a version with an English and Hungarian translation? Well. . .
I’m reluctant to detract from the euphoria about the emancipation of the captives and I’m loathe to begrudge the American president for the part he’s played in the effort to force Hamas to surrender its remaining captives. There’s a sordid backstory to all this, and I’ll be about it in due course. But bear with me for now, in the spirit of thanksgiving.
It’s a small world where good things happen to good people
The Nobel Peace Prize has gone quite rightly to the courageous Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado (I really should pull together an entire newsletter on Machado’s Venezuela). The decision has prompted “outrage” in the White House, at least according to Fox News, as in White House slams Trump’s perceived Nobel Peace Prize snub.
The Hungarian bit is about the Nobel prize that isn’t getting so much attention - the prize for literature. It’s gone to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
A very small world altogether
It just so happened that it was raining on Thursday. I’d been up most of the night, and after I filed to the National Post, Trump puts the Israel haters in a corner and sent along the newsletter A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah, I did not ride my Triumph Bonneville T100 to my usual Thursday lunch rendezvous with my biker chums. I drove instead, and as is my custom, I was listening to the BBC on the radio, and. . . wait, is that George Szirtes I hear?