Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteI'm not physically deskbound.
As you know, I can pick up a camera bag, get in the Pony, and take a long walk around Antietam, Maryland, but age, finances, family, and worry draw their due and getting out almost always costs something . . . . so here is my world on a monitor 1600 x 1200 pixels.
Picking up where I left off: I only wanted to put up a note on Peter Godwin's book, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun this morning, but eyes and mind have slipped into the Internet's coverage of Zimbabwe, and from there, the YouTube shows.
This one will break your heart (or should).
It bears the title, "Beautiful Rhodesia," and you almost expect John Wayne to come walking out of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYDg3ofh7dM
From "Salisbury77" and boasting the music of John Edmond -- http://www.johnedmond.co.za -- it shows what Zimbabwe was in the 1970's. One may well understand resentment toward the Brits, the whites, the colonists and the popular majority, true majority, reaction toward a hardline right-side Ian Smith, but note too the development, prosperity, and agriculture.
Of course it takes a whole country to make a whole coherent country, and as rediscovered now and then in Kenya and elsewhere, getting far enough ahead of destitution and disenfranchisement to ward off the ambitious personalities who promise the downtrodden the world--and very little in the way of a plan to do it in a way beneficial and progressive for all--proves a mean trick.
In any case, for another Scotts-Irish like, British down-home, good-ol'-boys take on the Rhodesia that was, this site has made a small industry of nostalgia, which is generally history recalled selectively: http://www.youtube.com/user/memoriesofrhodesia.
And may one judge this next by the content of its character, which I think fairly familiar to U.S. eyes and ears: liberal, inclusive, playful, sentimental--a snapshot from the life that was once lived.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY7c6XtFn7A
From rowdierhodie channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/rowdyrhodie. Caption: "A short photo video I made of home and all my treasured memories of the country we were forced to leave behind. Thanks to all who donated pictures for me to use."
Thank you, rowdierhodie, for the tour.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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