Saturday, March 15, 2014

Discern Truth from Falsehood




I’ve Charlie Rouse on from the 1960 set “Taken Care of Business.”  The tune ‘Blue Farouq’ was actually written by Blue Mitchell, the trumpet player whom I wrote about last month.  It is almost impossible to imagine Charlie Rouse playing without Monk.  The sounds are so intertwined.  But he comes through punchy, angular, bright here playing with Walter Bishop Jr. on the keys instead.  His sound is immediately recognizable, without the familiar landscape of the Monk tunes we’ve all heard so many times.  The cover is black with yellow blotches and resembles half a Rorschach test.  This next tune “204” is written by Randy Weston and that makes sense with its pugilistic positivism.  I had a look and ‘Farouq’, the boys’ name apparently means to be able to discern truth from falsehood.




We need a bit of Farouq-like perspicacity, to get through the news these days.  Major stories evolving slowly, or not at all.  A fair amount of scrambling, 露尾[1] and out right flip flopping.  Poor Malaysia just cannot get out of the hot seat with this missing plane.  Last night the prime minister has decided to open a criminal investigation into why the plane now made a series of maneuvers that suggest a human navigation.   Either the pilot and/or copilot decided to fly the plane up to 45,000 feet turn off the trackers and then bank hard left or someone forced them to do it.  This must be excruciating for all the families who want some closure.  Now the press is staked out in front of the pilot’s house.  It must be maddening to have all this decided in the court of public opinion were you to be in any way close to these men from the cockpit.

Meanwhile, the Kunming train station incident has faded from view.  People seems content to assume that terrorists plotted and executed the attack.  But a host of basic questions remained unanswered:  Why did people use knives if they were part of a funded network?  Why lash out at Kunming?  Why was no one claiming responsibility?  I found the following article helpful at peeling back a few layers on who these people were, what their grievances were. 



The article claims that these Uighur men and women were down in Kunming because they were fugitives from an earlier confrontation with police back in Xinjiang that had lead to nearly 100 arrests of people trying to flee through Yunnan.  These people were unable to flee the country, unable to return home and becoming increasingly desperate.  They decided to secure rudimentary knives and versions of their separatist flags locally and then lash out at the city they were stuck in.  It all begins to seem a lot less like an international network of well-funded terrorists, and rather a bunch of cornered people, who snapped, albeit in a dramatic and brutal way.

Trying to push on through here but the internet keeps dropping the stream of this lovely music I'm listening to this morning.  Annoying.  I’ve been having more than my share of compromised connections.  The blog host for Kunming article, East by South East, who have an interesting focus on matters between China and South East Asia, also had an interesting article of a Westerner who went around the day after the attack and spoke with people and took photos.   This seems to take some of the air out of the rhetorical claim that this was somehow China’s 9/11.  This post suggests thing were largely back to normal. 
http://www.eastbysoutheast.com/kunming-aftermath-train-station-attack/
  



Even though the numbers were unfathomably large (29 dead and 143 wounded) and the method, slashing unsuspecting passengers unspeakably deliberate and brutish, this was certainly not China’s 9/11.  And even if the Malaysian Airline jet is ultimately proved to be a hijacking gesture aimed at China, it won’t constitute a 9/11 moment either.  Let’s hope something that qualifies remains beyond the pale for the rest of our days.  For were it to come, the “taking care of business” aftermath will be nearly impossible to control. 




[1] cángtóulùwěi:  to hide the head and show the tail (idiom); to give a partial account / half-truths

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