Hakuna Potato

Warthog and suricate or meerkat from the photorealist Lion King that opened this week. Terrible as the cartoon was, this one has to be far worse. 

My kids were Disney-aged through the string of animated hits of what I guess were the Katzenberg years, Little Mermaid through Pocahontas, and I saw them all, some repeatedly, in addition to reading the book versions aloud, and mostly really hated them for various reasons, especially the disloyalty to the sources—they seemed to me to be working to destroy the sources, from Hans Christian Andersen to colonial history of Virginia, and replace them with perverted simulacra.

For instance in the case of Beauty and the Beast, Mme de Beaumont's Enlightenment fable of falling in love on grounds of moral affinity rather than being distracted by the superficialities was transformed by changing the character of the Beast. In the original he is a Beast because of the completely arbitrary malice of a wicked fairy, but unfailingly kind, generous, and self-effacing, which is why the Beauty comes to love him and the enchantment is overcome. Disney makes him into a cruel person who is bestified by a very judgmental fairy, as deserved punishment, and he becomes handsome again because he's making an effort to be nicer. The moral of the story turns out to be that if you're ugly it's probably your fault because you were mean to some old lady, and serves you right.

But the one I hated the most was The Lion King, for really political reasons at first.

Coup who?

Giraffe, Air Mountain, Niger via African Rock Art.

Masha Gessen's New Yorker article noting the resemblances between General John Kelly's speech style and the language of the military coup:

Before walking off the stage, Kelly told Americans who haven’t served in the military that he pities them. “We don’t look down upon those of you who haven’t served,” he said. “In fact, in a way we are a little bit sorry because you’ll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our servicemen and women do—not for any other reason than that they love this country.”

You know who in particular that applies to, right? The guy with the heel spurs, from which he may still suffer, judging from the style in which he exercises, riding his little golf cart from fairway to hole to fairway, getting on foot only those 36 times to make his brief gestures with the clubs and then climbing back in. I'll never forget that golf cart ride he took in Taormina last spring while the rest of the G-7 leaders were walking uphill 700 yards to the town piazza (The Hill notes that he did join them on the way back down).

Why would General Kelly be publicly humiliating the president that way?

What was the point of that pantomime of limiting questions to reporters from "Gold Star families" or their friends—

Mister Brooks—He delusional

Mombasa skyline, via Kenyans.org.

Dog whistles are everywhere these days, and if you listen close enough you might hear one that's meant for you, as when David Brooks lets liberals know that he's not opposed to this week's White House Africa summit, though taking care to leave it to the end of the piece, as if he'd just happened to think of it in the course of writing his big Africa column of the year and didn't want to leave it out altogether, and then sealing it with a dis (because it's not really a Brooks column without a dash of gratuitous spite):

Safari so good

Urban Warrior collection from Sanabora Design House, Nairobi.

David Brooks starts out at a respectable pace with complaints (extracted from a famous 2005 Granta essay by Binyavanga Wainaina) about exoticism in writing on Africa from a hodgepodge of sources which appears to include the National Geographic vintage around 1965, Ethiopian famine porn, and appreciations of Disney's The Lion King, but quickly bogs down into the misapprehension that bare breasts and distended bellies are not OK only because Africa has changed since the 1990s and is no longer the exotic place it once was. (They were never OK.)

Hence Brooks's interest in the #BringBackOurGirls agitation against Boko Haram in the social media, to which he seems to take some kind of exception because [jump]