[PHOTO] Toronto's Bolivar

The latest addition to my Flickr photostream is a picture that I took on the 1st of this month of the statue of South America's great champion, Simón Bolivar, in south-central Toronto's Trinity-Bellwoods Park.



The various plaques reveal that this statue was a gift from the Municipality of Caracas to the City of Toronto in 1983. As this Peruvian community website hints, the statue likely plays an important symbolic role for the Latin American communities of Toronto, particularly for those immigrant communities coming from the six countries (Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia) liberated by Bolivar.

boldts.net has in its another picture of the statue, first from the bottom, this one taken from the east and under brighter lighting.

[LINK] "Superpower swoop"

Misha Glenny's New Statesman article "Superpower swoop" enunciates some of my worst fears about the recent conflict in the Caucasus.

Georgia's decision to seize large parts of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, on the evening of 7 August was a disastrous political miscalculation, even in an era that is increasingly defined by spectacularly poor judgement.

Within three days of the assault, Russian forces had responded by in effect neutralising Georgia's military capacity, which President Mikhail Saakashvili's government in Tbilisi had spent several years and considerable sums of money building up.

Clearly, Russia has been goading and provoking the Georgian government for several years into making the big mistake. The parastates of Abkhazia and, above all, South Ossetia, have been under the control of a toxic coalition of criminals and both former and serving FSB officers. Russian soldiers have been acting as their protectors under the guise of a peacekeeping mission, preventing Georgia's attempts to seek a negotiated reintegration of the two areas. The Georgian crisis has benefited the standing of hardliners in Moscow, still aggrieved at Vladimir Putin's decision to place the moderate, business-friendly Dmitry Medvedev in the Kremlin.

But under the influence of an energetic neo-con lobby in Washington, and with considerable support from Israeli weapons manufacturers and military trainers, Saakashvili and the hawks around him came to believe the farcical proposition that Georgia's armed forces could take on the military might of their northern neighbour in a conventional fight and win.

[. . .]

[T]he neocons in Washington have been pushing Georgian and Ukrainian membership [in NATO] as a critical goal for the maintenance of the western alliance. By cranking up the dispute with Russia over Nato, Cheney is shifting the political debate in the US away from the state of the economy and towards the issue of national security.

If the presidential election is fought on the former issue, Barack Obama is a shoo-in. But if the central issue is national security and who would be best at dealing with a major crisis like Georgia, then his Republican opponent, John McCain, has to be favourite. McCain's response to Georgia was almost as tough as Cheney's, explained in part by the fact that until May this year his chief foreign policy adviser was working as a lobbyist for Saakashvili.

Just great.

[MUSIC] Men Without Hats, "Pop Goes the World"

Whenever I hear of crises in the world, I think--inaccurately, given the subject matter--of the song "Pop Goes The World". What is it? I blogged last October about Canadian group Men Without Hats' hit 1982/1983 song "The Safety Dance." That was their biggest hit, arguably their only international hit of note. Their biggest Canadian (and, Wikipedia tells me, Austrian and Swedish and also Top 20 American) hit was the 1987 "Pop Goes the World". A low-resolution video courtesy of Unvevrsal Music is available at YouTube right here. The song alone is available below.

"RMR: Rick's Rant - Lest We Forget" (Watch on YouTube)

I'll be lazy and let Wikipedia tell a chunk of the song's story, available in full in the lyrics right here below.

The song very generally tells a story of "Johnny" and "Jenny," the two members of fluid musical group (both the members' instruments of choice and the band name appears to change throughout the song) on their quest for fame in the industry, though at one point the lyrics note that they come to the realization that they could make "more money on a movie screen." The lyrics imply that the fictional group's best-known single is, in fact, called Pop Goes the World.

Interjected in the narrative about Johnny and Jenny are more abstract (or less sensical) lyrics such as "One two three and four is five/Everybody here is a friend of mine/Whatever happened to the Duke of Earl?/Pop Goes The World".

It's at this point that the melancholy comes in to end the song.

And every time I wonder where the world went wrong,
End up lying on my face going ringy dingy ding dong

And every time I wonder if the world is right,
End up in some disco dancin' all night & day.

Johnny played guitar, Jenny played bass,
Name of the band is the human race.
Everybody tell me have you heard? Pop goes the world.

Johnny played guitar, Jenny played bass,
Ain't nobody couldnt take their place.
Everybody tell me have you heard? Pop goes the world.....

Maybe I'm not so wrong to associate this song with some sort of catastrophe in the world after all. Maybe I'm wrong only about the scale of said trauma.

[LINK] "Russia "perplexed" by Belarus silence on Georgia"

Russia's ambassador to Belarus said on Tuesday that Moscow could not understand why its western neighbour, nominally a close ally, had failed to offer the Kremlin open support in its conflict with Georgia. Belarus, whose President Alexander Lukashenko is accused by the West of crushing fundamental rights, has portrayed itself as a close Russian ally since the 1990s.

The two neighbours are committed to forming a merged post-Soviet "union state", though this has been put on the backburner, especially since 2007 when they quarrelled over energy prices.

"We are somewhat perplexed by the modest silence of the Belarussian side. You need to express yourself more clearly on such issues, especially as we have a union state," ambassador Alexander Surikov told a briefing.

Can my Belarusian readers bring any light onto this subject? I know that the Belarusian government has been trying to strengthen its relations with countries other than Russia, at least in partial reaction to the rising prices of Russian natural gas and Lukashenko's relatively weak hand in the Union state, but that's it.