I have a piece up at Double X on the subject. Here’s a taste:
The story is much bigger than the woman it stars. And so to Westerners who work inside of Myanmar, amidst the 48 million Burmese who are not international celebrities, the American cult of Suu Kyi can seem like remote, self-referential performance art. (I was an editor of the Myanmar Times from 2003 to 2005 and was refused entry to the country last December.) Suu Kyi’s list of vocal supporters includes Laura Bush, Jim Carrey, Sylvester Stallone, and hundreds of placard-wielding college kids around the country. The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is inevitably described as “petite,” “well-spoken,” and most of all “elegant.” “She is like a beautiful flower,” John McCain told Brian Lamb in 2004. There are candlelight vigils in Dallas and protest rallies in Toronto. There is the claim that the National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi’s erstwhile party, is a vital force rather than the tired circle of septuagenarians one actually encounters at its Yangon headquarters. On Facebook, one can send a form e-mail to Than Shwe, a dictator who lives in paranoid isolation, requesting that he stop oppressing his fellow Burmese and concluding with “I look forward to hearing from you.”
Also, kindly note that I do not write my own headlines.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D8BB55AFFF1C4B82 thoughts?
Good to know you don’t write your own headlines. Is there anyway that can be changed? It seems the XX headlines are way more sensationalist than the posts themselves. I understand the need to attract eyes to the blog, but whoever writes the headlines might be taking it too far.
This did not appear in my RSS reader until a day after the post was up. I don’t know if that is something on your end. Interesting post.
Yeah, the headline thing seems to be a tradition they’ve carried over from Slate.