Sore Body on a Calm Saturday

Speedskating is a very hard sport. It's that way for top athletes, and it certainly is hard when you first get back on the ice in the fall. I felt sore and tired the whole week after a short hour of some single laps at Amsterdam's Jaap Edenbaan.I suppose it didn't help that it was windy on Monday and that after eight years at the indoor rink in Milwaukee I'm not used to skating with wind. I could not believe the way my legs felt climbing the railroad bridge near Weesp on Wednesday morning (Tuesday morning I had taken it easy because of the icy conditions). So I was happy this morning with the calm conditions. There was some wind, and it was in my face most of the way out to Lage Vuursche, for example along the Loenderveense Plas, but it wasn't bad, although it still took some effort to keep the spedometer above 17 (required speed to get to the restaurant right at the 10 am opening time). It was mid- to high 30s, and on the way home the sun started pushing through the cloudcover to the point where we could detect our shadows on the ground. I was comfortable in a jacket (two more layers underneath), thick (though not yet the insulated) tights, balaclava, lobster gloves, and winter shoes (no covers). The investment in these SIDI winter shoes a few years ago is really paying off now. They already made winterriding in Milwaukee more feasible, but these days on the commute to Amsterdam, I really never have to worry about cold or wet feet. The ride back was friendly and easy, and the wind was at my back once again the last 11 miles along the Vecht river. It's a great privilege indeed to be able to do this almost every week.

Highly Recommended: The Dirty Dozen

Pittsburgh's Danny Chew's ride like no other, traditionally the Saturday after Thanksgiving. If you're in the neighborhood of Pittsburgh and have a 39x28 (or lighter) handy, this is highly recommended, at least if you don't mind a few hills. The Dirty Dozen takes all day and goes over the thirteen steepest climbs in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, where there is lots, lots to choose from. It's a race up every hill, neutral in between, and they wait for everyone at the top of the climb. Be glad it's not the 1980s, when most of them were cobbles and the Dirty Dozen code of honor basically mandated 42x24 gearing. Having done the ride twice, I can't imagine how they did that. Look, for example, at Canton Avenue, certified as the world's steepest street, where you need a good running start and then have to shift up flawlessly and maintain a straight line; if you start swerving only a little bit, you're lost. Sycamore Street, of the old Thrift Drug Classic days, is one of the easier ones on the list. Here's a YouTube clip from the last hill, Flowers-Tesla in Hazelwood, last year--you can find more by searching for "Dirty Dozen Pittsburgh" on YouTube. One of these days I'm going to fish hard for a Thanksgiving invitation at a Pittsburgh friend's home, so that I can also do a third Dirty Dozen, and get my name on Danny's list of people with three or more Dirty Dozens under their belt. (If I had a lot of money, I might well go back every year). If you go this weekend, get there early, because with a forecast of 43 degrees and sunny skies there promise to be over 100 people at the Washington Boulevard Swan'Odrome gathering place.

Stretching Pinochet

In an ad in the current New York Review of Books, Basic Books goes a little overboard trying to sell Heraldo Muñoz's The Dictator's Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet, A Political Memoir: "Augusto Pinochet was the most important Third World dictator of the Cold War, and perhaps the most ruthless." He was important, but especially to Chile, and he was a bastard. Still, the "most important" of them all? We'd have to place China outside of the Third World, for starters, but then would still be left with figures such as Pol Pot, Mobutu, Syngman Rhee, Suharto, a whole series of fellow tyrants in the Western hemisphere, to say nothing of Middle East tyrants such as the Shah, Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Hasaf Al Assad--the list goes on. I'm sure Muñoz's book is a valuable contribution to the historiography of Cold War Chile, and of U.S. intervention in Latin America and the wider Third World. This kind of sales job, however (how does one define "important" in this case anyway?), says more about the political position of the publisher than the Cold War in the Third World. And let me hasten to repeat: Pinochet was most certainly a bastard. And let me also hasten to add: the U.S. role in his coming to power and Washington's support for his regime was certainly also misguided, to say the least.

Daniel Ortega Doesn't Change Much,

and now many of his comrades-in-arms are beginning to see the light. When I returned to my graduate education in 1992 after a visit to Nicaragua during which a friend and I had interviewed Nicaragua's former president, one teacher was not impressed. "He's a tyrant!" was his response to the picture of Ortega and I shaking hands. I should still have the picture somewhere, but I'll admit it's not in a frame, and maybe in part that's due to my teacher's response to what I thought was mainly a coup (after all: at the time I didn't speak one word of Spanish--my friend, and an American free-lance journalist who was also in the interview, did all the talking; at the time I believed I understood about 25% of what was being said). The man indeed is a little dictator, and he's proving it during his new tenure as his country's president to the point where he is now losing prominent, long-standing members of what in recent years has already been a truncated Sandinista party. First he alienates large sections of his movement (which go on to found their own political movement), now he's losing people from those who decided to stick with him. Back during the 1970s and 1980s there was a clear, and not terribly uplifting, U.S. role in Nicaraguan events, one that to an extent explained some of the less than democratic policies Ortega and the Sandinistas pushed through. What's interesting about this week's article is the absence of any mention of a U.S. role. Sadly, Nicaraguans seem to be inflicting most of their ongoing, apparently never-ending misery on each other, without much help from the outside; and sadly, a deluded, washed-up Cold War revolutionary, one who should have retired a long time ago, is doing a lot of the damage.

Wintry Riding

No coffee ride, this weekend, because on Friday the weather turned a little violent (very strong winds, temperatures down into the mid-30s, and regular snow and hail showers during which the winds got even stronger), and on Saturday it was still a little iffy. We could have gone, Saturday morning, but would almost certainly have run into a snow or hail shower or two, and the wind would still have been pretty fierce. I wasn't that eager anyway, because for a variety of reasons I managed to ride to the city and back last week on four consecutive days. Eight hours on the bike: not bad for mid-November. Today the Sunday group did its traditional mountainbike loop through Lage Vuursche (indeed, the old Vuursche Boer again--but their applie pie, and their service, really is always excellent, so why change?). In order to ride, I had to prepare the old tractor, my red Trek 920 which I bought used at the end of 1995 at Pittsburgh Pro Bicycles (then still on Murray) because in that December month I rather suddenly really needed a snow bike. I also took it on many epic mountainbike rides with Pittsburgh Masters Velo Club through two of Pittsburgh's great parks: Schenley and Frick, which both offer a great variety of challenging single track trails and easier, wider stuff. If we concluded these rides at the old slag heaps overlooking the Monongahela River (now sadly sacrificed to development projects), we got an original "triple crown" ride (of course still completed at the 61C on Murray). In 1996, during a semester in Leipzig, Germany, I took the Trek, newly fitted with slick tires, for my city bike. But on Sunday mornings, I'd use it for a 2-3 hour road ride, to the southeast of the city, through towns like Altenhain and Brandis. Barren, windy, rides. The past eight years, the Trek has exclusively served as snow bike, to get me to work when there was too much snow to ride the skinny tires. This past winter, Milwaukee's second snowiest on record, it saw more duty that its owner cared for, and there were days the snow really was too thick to ride through. On those days, my little 2 mile commute took me half an hour or so, and I'd usually fall off a couple of times (not a real problem in the thick snow). The other week, I remounted the slick tires for the first time since Leipzig, and today we had a fine, muddy ride through various woods and heathlands. Nothing that was difficult technically, but there were quite a few places where it was icy, even on the packed-down dirt trails in the woods. It took me about an hour altogether to clear bike, rider, and clothing, but it was worth it.

Russia, Georgia, and NATO: Go Slow

Anne Applebaum, too, emphasizes how the Georgia-Russia story is complicated, certainly more complicated than "good" versus "evil" (regardless of whom you'd call good, or justified in his conduct here). She doesn't directly discuss the issue of possible NATO membership of Georgia, but there seems little doubt as to where she stands on that, given her conclusion:

In the long term, the Georgians need to choose a leader who can promote true political and economic stability. Until then, Western leaders should support Georgian democracy—not particular Georgian democrats—and prepare a unified response to the Russian military escapades to come. And while the propaganda battle rages, they must stay on the sidelines.
Premature, at best. And it raises the question: if there may be other ways for the West ("unified"--good luck with that) to respond to Russian military escapades, where does this leave NATO as the central security framework for an expanding transatlantic community? Forecasting eventual Georgian membership in the alliance, as most Western leaders did last summer, does not seem to be helpful here. It's nothing new to say this, but it appears that the further East NATO goes, the more it becomes a cause for trouble, instead of the stabilizing factor it is designed to be. This is ironic, because from an East European perspective, the main benefit of NATO membership is to deter Russia from trying to impose its will on what used to be its sphere of influence. Paradoxically, both could hold: Russia is probably more circumspect (though not without means of applying pressure) in its dealings with the Baltic states because of their membership in the alliance, but the expansion of NATO into the Baltic region has also made Russia more difficult to deal with on a range of issues. Meanwhile, the other reason for NATO expansion (encourage the development of open societies in formerly communist countries, or, expanding the democratic transatlantic community) can be seen as having worked fairly well. Of course, there are plenty of people who would argue that this latter goal can also be achieved through the EU's eastward expansion alone; although I'm not sure if a majority among them can be found in Eastern Europe, or whether Russia doesn't view EU expansion as a hostile act also. So it keeps coming back to relations with Russia. And I'm afraid there are no clear answers. Obviously we don't want to give Russia veto power over everything the West (EU/NATO) tries to do in Eastern Europe, in part because Russia's objections to the region's westernization derive from the fact that Russia's rulers see westernization as a threat to their power base at home (there's your Cold War parallel for the day). On the other hand, Russia is there, it's important (it's getting colder now in Europe, and we need their natural gas), and we're not going to go to war with it over places like Georgia, no matter how admirable parts of its democratization have been. Still, it really does appear that further NATO expansion (also into Ukraine) had better be kept on the back burner for the foreseeable future.

Russia, (Georgia), and the West--the Other Perspective

It comes from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, who just visited Georgia. It's a pretty convincing argument for making the Georgia situation less central to relations with Moscow (which is not the same as going back to business-as-usual with Putin and his gang). In his conversations with Georgians (journalists, for example), Kristoff was able to confirm that Georgia is still a ways off from being a genuinely open society (which would be one requirement for EU and NATO membership). And he makes a compelling argument that NATO membership would be exactly the wrong thing, not only for the West, but also for Georgia itself.